Deadline

This book really suffered from being a second book. All the fun world-building has already happened, and now the characters more or less just dash about madly getting into place and having revelations so that the climactic showdown of the third book can happen.

I really enjoyed that Sean heard his dead sister's voice, but I kept thinking "Wow, more characters should hear voices, this is a great device!" which is, I am aware, more than a little odd of me.

Also a strange technical choice: half-way through, the reader finally gets the final word on whether Sean and George were actually incestuously involved or just weirdly co-dependent. (It's the former.) And I'm really not sure why it took so long for the author to let me know. It's not like it's a big reveal, it just slips out, and provides a couple more paragraphs of angst for Sean.

Also, the book doesn't do much end on a cliff-hanger as end ten feet or from the cliff, road-runner style. The editors must agree with me, because the, chapter of the sequel provides at the end at least a couple fingers in the cliffside.

It starts in the same way as Feed, with someone poking a zombie with a stick but soon departs in different direction. If you haven't read Feed yet, then this review will contain spoilers for the first book in the trilogy.

The narration moves to Shaun in this instalment. I think the man we see from his point of view is different from the one George saw and described in Feed. Maybe we can let him off as he's having a tough time getting over the loss of his sister, although she's not completely gone; Shaun has started to hear her voice in his head. He's aware he's most likely crazy but that doesn't stop him trying to get to the bottom of the conspiracy which got her killed.

Whereas Feed dealt with the evolution of news reporting and spread of information, Deadline doesn't have any strong message other than the need for answers. There's a lot of repetition, I lost count of the times Shaun explained about his craziness or that he just doesn't care what other people think. The novel is over 500 pages long and it could have easily lost 200 of them and been a better book. Considering they're running round avoiding the CDC and zombies, it all felt a little slow and that wasn't helped by the desire to slap the whining out of Shaun.

And as for those zombies, they didn't really feature much. It was much more about the Kellis-Amberlee virus which in itself is interesting but didn't have a strong enough plot to carry it. There's an event which occurs nearer the end which I would have loved brought forward as it suddenly became gripping and there were all these unanswered questions swirling round in my head. Though I kind of saw the actual ending coming.

Saying all that, I will be reading Blackout when it's released. I like the world that was created in Feed and I want to know what happens next...