Former Army Ranger Connor 'Tav' McTavish emerges from a year alone in the Vermont mountains to find that an electromagnetic pulse has ended the modern world. In a small college town stripped of law and order, he stumbles upon four very different women — stranded at an all-girls liberal arts school — and an older caretaker who need exactly his skillset to survive. What begins as a crash course in wilderness survival and guerrilla defense quickly evolves into something more: a community taking shape around Tav's leadership, and a polyamorous family forged under fire. The series contains explicit adult scenes throughout.

Tav is a no-nonsense, deeply competent ex-Ranger whose military training and year of mountain solitude have made him almost preternaturally calm under fire. He is fundamentally protective — of his women, his community, and eventually his country — and his decency toward those he guards stands in sharp contrast to the predatory men who fill the series' villain roles. His relationship with the women grows organically from necessity to genuine affection.

Across twenty books, Tav and his growing band of warrior women progress from teaching college girls to trap rabbits and fend off a local biker gang, to repelling a North Korean military invasion of the Eastern Seaboard. The series moves through four distinct phases: community survival, local threat elimination, large-scale regional warfare, and ultimately a desperate covert mission to prevent a super weapon from ending the war on the enemy's terms. Throughout, Tav's tactical expertise, the women's remarkable growth from civilians to elite fighters, and the warmth of their unorthodox family keep the series grounded even as the stakes go global.