– Customer review on 03/08/2010

In short: this is a really good book. Read it!

In long: in a world where the Zombie Apocalypse has already happened (in fact, our two protagonists are young adults born after it all happened) and people live behind thick walls, constant blood tests (deliberately painful, because loss of pain sensitivity is an early sign of zombification) and in constant fear, three young news reporters get hired by a US Presidential candidate to physically follow his campaign, something very dangerous thing to do when there are zombie packs running around. However, as they investigate events around the campaign, they uncover things that some powerful people would prefer remain hidden, and find out the hard way that the living are far more dangerous than the dead.

Told in first person, this book addresses the questions of security, freedom and responsibility on a number of levels. Persons with strong conservative beliefs may feel distressed by the fact that the narrator is an atheist with strong views on personal freedoms, but several secondary characters express a wide variety of religious and political views that are handled with sensitivity. The ecological and political setup is believable and logical, and the author has clearly researched the postulated cause of the zombie virus as the medical data is consistent and feasible, both in what it does and the stated medical causes why.

The book is filled with a wry, dark humour, from the opening sequence, where the narrator does her best Evel Kineval impersonation to get herself and her brother away from a pack of zombies, to the introduction of Lois the cat, with stops including the narrator's opinion of formal clothing (torturous) and the doggerel used for voice recognition security software.

The end, while completing the story, does leave one wanting more. Fortunately the rest of the trilogy is on the way.