Deadline by Mira Grant

This would be the series I accidentally started in the middle, as the Kindle was thumbing its nose at my attempts to find publication dates. I was on a plane at the time, and didn't have internet access to check.

So, yes, I started in the middle. That may have affected how I viewed this book.

And for the most part, I enjoyed it, but I didn't love it. It's fairly solid all the way through, with some very nice tension being built in times of zombie outbreaks. It's not heavy character stuff, but there's enough there. And I'm not a zombie aficionado, so the fact that I liked it at all is probably a good sign.

But man, did I ever dislike the villain. Or rather, did I ever find him frustrating. Look, they talk in this book about the previous book, about the villain of that piece being almost a cartoony mustache-twirling super villain. If you get that that's what it was like, why do it again? 

And honestly, his little diatribe about what he was doing and why, I didn't understand it at all. It didn't make narrative sense, and as far as I could tell, it didn't make logical sense either. (The annoyingness of flipping back a few pages on the Kindle to reread to see if I could understand as it became clear more explanations were not going to be forthcoming meant that I just forged ahead, befuddled.)

So, anyway. Many years after the Rising, Shaun Mason, "action journalist" or "Irwin" still grieves the loss of his serious-journalist sister. He does a not-very-good job of running their news/blog site after she was gone. But then a dead doctor shows up on his doorstep (and not the zombie kind), and he's plunged back into fighting and running from the conspiracy that killed his sister. 

The rest of the book is that pursuit, and the feeling of a surveillance state instituted to fend off zombie attacks was well done. It heightens the tension when it needs to be heightened. I just wish the conspiracy made a little more sense. I suppose all will truly be revealed in the third book in the trilogy. But I wasn't enthralled with this one.

(I will probably read the other two, though, as they were both nominated for Hugos, I think, and I'm trying to work my way through all the Hugo nominees. I'm about a quarter of the way there.)

Booklinks:

I read this book as part of an attempt to read all the Hugo Nominees