THE REMNANT (audiobook) by William Michael Davidson

Published in June of 2017 by Dancing Lemur Press LLC
Read by Michael Burnette
Duration: 9 hours, 19 minutes
Unabridged

In a future America, religion is nearly a thing of the past. A man-made super-flu not re-wrote the genetic code of its victims, nullifying the combination of genes that allow human beings to express religious belief. The government actively hunts down anyone who was immune to the changes through a combination of an elaborate spy network and implants installed in people's brains at birth that allow the government to track people.

Colton Pierce is a pompous, clueless "extractor" who works for the Center for Theological Control. He apprehends religious people and sends them to an island where they live out the rest of their lives in quarantine. That is until now - the government plans to kill them all off, a move that Colton supports until his son gets caught up in a raid and will soon be sent off to the island...

I had two serious issues with this book:

#1 Is faith really a genetic thing? For a book that intends to be sympathetic to religious faith, it rests on a premise that is unfriendly to religion. It claims that religion is not a matter of conscience, it is a matter of simple genetics, like having blue eyes or curly hair.

#2 If it is a genetic thing and if the government has the ability to detect and eliminate that gene, why don't they genetically test babies when they are installing the implants into their brains and just imprison them then? This would remove the need for having to hunt them down.

The reader, Michael Burnette did a stellar job of reading for the Colton Pierce character. But, the book as a whole suffered from internal logic problems that meant it just could not hold itself together, no matter how well it was read.

I rate this audiobook 2 stars out of 5.

Note: I received a promotional copy of this audiobook from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: The Remnant.