Survival Instinct
Author: Cara Bristol
Reviewer: Sophia Rose
Rating: A
What I’m Talking About:
When aliens first came to earth, humans didn’t realize just how devastating first contact would be. Now, it’s everyone for themselves. Cara Bristol started a new series mixing post-apocalyptic and sci-fi elements with a riveting enemies to lovers romance.
A woman who has lost everyone she cared about, her career, and former life hides in a cave near her old family home dreading the day the alien enemy Progg-Res or bands of bad humans finds her and ends it all. But, instead, Laurel’s first encounter with another person is a wounded alien and her healer’s heart, as broken and angry as she is, won’t allow her to take his life. No, she finds herself taking him in as her prisoner and trying to resist his subtle attempts to calm her hostility and fear.
Grav is shot by a human, his communication device and vaporizer are taken from him, and he’s discovered in his weak, wounded state by a fury of a female who is ambivalent about his existence. He knows what she does not- that he’s been left behind and vulnerable to small concentration of human survivors. He has to persuade Laurel to spare him and let him go. That’s a tall order when his kind decimated hers even if he’s personally never killed a soul.
Survival Instinct show-cased a vulnerable, but savvy heroine, a hero who is alien, but personable, and a situation that make it difficult for them to find a way path all the death and destruction to any understanding. A world that lost the majority of its population and all its leadership structure and infrastructure was a dangerous and fascinating backdrop setting for it all.
Meant to be standalone, Survival Instinct will be followed up by at least a second book and for that I’m glad. I definitely want to explore more of this situation and other characters trying to survive it. Another powerful, intense story from Cara Bristol that I can heartily recommend.
My Rating: A
Sophia Rose
About the Book:
A nurse and an alien battle for trust in a devastated world
Laurel is a nurse working in her hometown hospital when disaster strikes. Aliens from planet Progg-Res attack Earth, vaporizing most of the population from huge spaceships. Then ground troops march town to town, house to house, eliminating the rest.
Laurel survives by hiding out in a cave, living day by day hoping to evade detection. After many months of quiet, she dares to venture out.
And finds a critically wounded Progg man in the woods. Instinct tells her to finish him off, but she can’t bring herself to kill in cold blood. Besides, he’s going to die anyway. However, she worries that leaving his body for his comrades to find will bring them too close to the hiding place that has served her well, so she drags the Progg’s body back to the cave.
Unfortunately, the alien scum survives and throws her into a dilemma. She can’t keep him prisoner forever, which means she has to release him and risk her life—or kill him.
Death at the hand of the enemy is an honorable one, but to his shame, Grav doesn’t want to die. Although he’s an aide to the admiral in charge of the Earth campaign, he’s never killed anyone, never even discharged his vaporizer. But he doesn’t think that will matter to the young human woman who took him hostage and looks at him with revulsion in her eyes.
The only thing he can do is try to build a rapport and convince her he’s harmless in hopes she’ll see him as a person and not one of the hated aliens who killed her family. If he can’t, he’s afraid he’s in deep trouble. Because he suspects she won’t release him. Which only leaves one other option.
Can two people bitterly divided by fear and loathing bridge the gap and trust one another so they both can survive?
Release Date: May 26, 2025
Publisher: Cara Bristol
Series: Standalone / Apocalypse #1
Genre: Post-Apocalyptic, Sci-Fi Romance
Format(s): paperback (224 pages), e-book
Book Source: Author