The strongest passages follow individuals through the collapse rather than describing the collapse from above. Listeners who have read her other books say the same thing in different words: this is journalism that reads like a thriller without pretending to be one, and the discipline of tying each step back to something that has already happened in the real world is what keeps it from sliding into disaster fiction. The section on the history of the relevant programmes is a particular favourite in the reviews, and one listener who works in the field describes the presentation of what a laboratory can and cannot contain as accurate and unusually unromantic.

The book's central proposition is genuinely striking: the model here is not the bomb, with its blast radius and its mushroom cloud, but the small thing that passes between people before anyone has agreed that there is a problem. Jacobsen makes that argument by pacing rather than by exhortation, and the effect is a book that is much quieter than its subject and considerably more frightening for it.

The complaints are real and they are worth knowing, because they will not suit every listener who loved the earlier book. One listener who came expecting the same intensity found that there was not much happening, described the scenario as almost boring, and used the words slow, dragged and somewhat repetitive; that is a fair description of a book that spends a long time on logistics. A second abandoned it early and was blunt about why: the images, which several listeners identify as machine-generated, struck them as jarring, the prose felt machine-like to them, and they objected to what they saw as tired stock characterisations of Russia in a book on this subject. The same reviewer raises a sourcing point that deserves repeating, because it is checkable: a researcher whose work the book leans on is not listed among the interviewees, in a volume whose authority rests on exactly that list. I would not let either complaint stop you, but a listener who wants the relentless momentum of the first book should know that this one is slower, more procedural, and, in one listener's words, even more despairing.

Content notes: this is a book about mass death, societal breakdown and the failure of institutions, and it does not soften any of it. There is nothing graphic in the clinical sense and the tone stays forensic throughout, but it is not a comfortable listen and it is not meant to be. Eleven hours, and it goes quickly once the clock starts. For the fictional version of the same unravelling, the site's 1984 is the obvious next stop.