The third installment in John Wesley Rawles’ Novels of the Coming Collapse series draws together themes and characters familiar to readers of the series and brings them to a conclusion which gives hope for the future of Western civilization.

Founders — like Patriots and Survivors, the two previous novels in the series — is set in the very near future. The background for the entire trilogy is a disturbingly realistic extrapolation of current economic and political conditions and policies. The dollar has finally collapsed and the fragile network of easy credit, deficit spending, and “just in time” business practices, combined with political hubris, has crashed the entire system of government and has taken the global economy along with it.

Rawles continues to explore the future by tracing the intersecting lines of the lives of various Americans suffering from the impact of the “coming collapse.” His characters are not simply a roster of steely-eyed survivalists; in fact, some of his heroes are almost completely unprepared for the collapse. Another crucial aspect of Rawles’ writing is that he resists the urge to engage in political treatises passed off as “speeches” — he is telling a story, and he does so quite skillfully. Although he has obviously thought quite deeply about the plight of the American Republic, and does not hesitate to speak quite decisively about its flaws and recent failings, he does not allow his analysis of such matters to disrupt the flow of the story.

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James Wesley Rawles, Founders—A Novel of the Coming Collapse, (New York: Atria, 2012) $25.99