'Plague Nation' - Dana Fredsti (Titan)

A really quick review today as I've been really busy with bits and pieces (including something that I'm very excited about) and, to be honest, it's too hot to be doing much more than reading. Hot weather and I don't get on all that well...
There's also the fact that some books don’t really come with a lot to talk about. You open them up, they do their job and you close them once you’re done. Nice story maybe but you can move onto the next book very easily and without much of a backward glance. Some books really are just about a ‘quick fix of story’ and ‘Plague Nation’ is one of those books. Have some blurb…

Ashley Parker was a ordinary woman who was also a wild card, immune to the emerging zombie plague, drawn unwillingly into a shadowy paramilitary organization. Having stopped the wave of the undead that swarmed their facility, the worst is yet to come, as the plague begins to manifest in key locations worldwide.

When you can sum up a book that easily you know it’s not carrying a lot of meat on its bones and that’s not necessarily a bad thing (just a thing really). ‘Plague Nation’ does its job well enough, delivering a whole load of action and chills that entertained me but didn’t stay with me afterwards. You could say that the book did its job when it mattered and those fans of the first book would enjoy this one too.

The one thing that did bug me was the uneven split between horror and urban fantasy tropes resulting in a book that felt like it wasn’t sure what it wanted to be. I’ll be honest and say that, as a fan of horror, the ‘snapshot moments’, where people were being attacked countrywide, really did it for me and delivered some nasty moments (as did one particular ‘zombie kill’). It just felt like these moments didn’t mesh well with the ‘urban fantasy moments’ which are shaping up to have Ashley decide between her half zombie lover and a dashing stranger. Sometimes a book just needs to decide what it wants to be and stick with it.

What it boils down to is that while there was enough there to leave me waiting to see how it all concludes; I’ll be reading out of a urge to complete a series rather more than anything else. Sometimes that’s just the way it goes.