A complete set that never says how many books it contains is a strange thing to be sold, and that is the first practical problem with this audiobook. The description bills it as the complete set containing all the books in Franklin Horton's bestselling THE WAY OF DAN series, then summarizes what reads as the opening volume alone: a burned-out man flying cross-country to Boise to bury a friend, a house holding more than old guitars, and an electromagnetic pulse that silences engines and cripples technology. Forty hours and twenty-one minutes is the only quantity the page will commit to.
This Boxed Set Never Says How Many Books
Series metadata is where the gap shows. Both series fields on the record sit empty, despite the title containing the words box set and the description naming a series outright. Genre filing is no steadier: the record is shelved simultaneously under literary fiction, mystery and thriller, and science fiction and fantasy, while its tag reads Genre Fiction. Post-apocalyptic survival fiction is a real category with real conventions, and none of those three shelves is it. Franklin Horton's own name sits in the publisher slot, so no house editor was ever going to catch the omission.
What the copy does describe is coherent and specific. Dan Slaughter's life is already a slow-motion car crash, in the description's phrase: burned out from a soulless job, still reeling from his wife's death, and unwilling to accept that his best friend Carl died of a drug overdose. Settling an estate turns into a fight for survival when Carl's house gives up a dark secret and Carl's associates turn out to be dangerous. Then the grid dies, and a man stranded thousands of miles from home has to become the Tennessee boy he spent his adult life burying. A cynical ex-cop named Holly Turner is the counterweight, arguing for a life beyond settling scores.
Note what the summary does not do. It never names a second book, never describes a later arc, and never says where the first volume ends. Every proper noun in the plot summary belongs to one setup: Boise, Carl, Holly Turner, Tennessee, Dan himself. Either the copy was lifted from the opening volume's own listing and left unedited, or the set is thinner than the word complete implies. Nothing published here lets a buyer distinguish between those two possibilities, and forty hours is a large sum to hand over on a guess.
Pierce Reads All Forty Hours of Vendetta
Length is the honest selling point. Forty hours in one purchase, read throughout by Kevin Pierce, is a long uninterrupted commitment to one character's deterioration, and continuity of voice is worth more in a revenge arc than in almost any other shape of story. The reason is simple: the pleasure depends on remembering exactly how the man sounded before he started, and a recording that changes readers between volumes forfeits that. Whatever else this listing leaves unsaid, it does not split the performance.
Tone is the second draw, and the description is unusually clear about it. Sometimes the story of an apocalypse is not one of tragedy but one of opportunity, it says, before describing a world without rules where justice is a bullet and every step is a gamble. That is a specific promise. Not the resource-management survivalism the genre often runs on, and not a collapse-of-civilization panorama either, but a personal vendetta that a catastrophe happens to make possible. Horton is credited as the author of The Borrowed World and The Mad Mick series, so the register should be familiar to anyone who has been through those.
Convenience is the third argument and the least glamorous one. Buying a series as a single unit removes the small friction of hunting down each volume, checking the reading order, and hoping the same performer stayed on the job, and in a genre that rewards binge listening that friction is real. The trade is that you commit to the whole arc before knowing whether the first stretch works for you. With a set this size the sample matters more than usual, and it happens to be the one piece of evidence this page lets you gather for yourself.
Unverifiable Volume Counts Meet Unrelenting Vengeance
Missing volume counts are not a small thing, and this one costs the buyer in two ways. It makes the set impossible to verify, since nobody can check whether a later book exists and has been left out. It also makes the purchase impossible to compare, because forty hours could be three long books or six short ones, and the shape of the reading experience differs enormously between those. Anyone who already owns part of the series has no way of telling from this page which parts are being sold back to them.
No written response has been filed against this record. It appeared in December 2025, the description is the only prose about it anywhere on the page, and nothing exists to cross-check the publisher's own summary against. That puts unusual weight on the sample, if you can find one, and on your prior experience with the author.
Expect violence, and expect it early. A man who refuses to accept an overdose verdict walks into a violent underworld inside the first stretch, and the copy's own words for what follows are unrelenting vengeance. Grief, addiction and bereavement all sit in the setup. This is not comfort listening, and forty hours of it is a long time to spend inside one man's worst decisions.
Trust Horton's Other Series Before Committing Here
Committed post-apocalyptic listeners with hours of solitary work ahead of them will get real value from a single forty-hour block, especially if they already trust this author's other series. Anyone who prefers revenge stories where the avenger is unglamorous, tired and out of his depth, rather than competent from page one, is well matched here. So is anyone who wants an EMP scenario used as a pressure device rather than as a technical exercise.
Hold your money if you need to know what you are buying. A set that will not state its own contents is a fair reason to wait for the publisher to fix the page, particularly if you own earlier volumes. Leave it alone as well when you want the counterweight character to carry equal weight, because the description gives Holly Turner a single clause and Dan everything else, and if bereavement plus sustained brutality is not what you want in your ears for a working week, this is not the set to start with.
Key Details
- Voice: Kevin Pierce carries forty hours of one man's collapse and revenge with no second credited voice, which makes tonal consistency the entire job.
- Big ideas: EMP collapse, grief-driven revenge, a buried rural past, survival without rules.
- Atmosphere: Grim and propulsive, with a cold streak running under it.
- Worth it?: A large, committed block of post-apocalyptic revenge, undercut by a listing that will not say how many books you are buying.
