Review: Solid entry but lacks focus
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 07 17, 2014
Bought this direct from Baen.tl;dirRingo delivers another solid entry in his "zombie" series, but his focus on minutia lowers this book to 3 stars.** SPOILERS **Book 2 left us with the intrepid Wolf Squadron leaving the Canaries to mount an attack on Gitmo. The goal is to get a real lab going so they can start producing vaccine and inoculate the submariners. It promised to be exciting. Finally, the submariners could get involved building zombie death boxes out of CONEX and start taking back the planet! The action might actually move to mainland USA!What we got instead was a David-Weber-like focus on military counseling sessions for Lt. Faith and more descriptions of the same clearance operations that were already done to death in the first two books. (Weber is famous for having entire chapters devoted to multiple characters sitting around a table detailing their dastardly plans and demonstrating their own rank hypocrisy while Our Heroes get their own chapters to have the same long conversations detailing how they will defeat the Bad Guys. Plus, Weber rarely advances the plot even over an 800+ page book. See his Safehold series; 7 books long and they are still steam powered.)The odd thing about the book is that quite a few cool plot advancements took place, but they got short shrift.* They cleared and freed Gitmo.* They landed a SpaceX ship on a Caribbean island and got some real doctors & scientists back.* They got some helicopters working.* Lots of babies started getting born.* They rescued Prince (King?) Harry from the Tower of London.* We finally learn who "Tom Walker" really is. (I won't spoil that in this review.)However, the Gitmo clearance happens in a day. Clearing the island for the spaceship to land takes 2 days. Rescuing the Prince/King takes a week of travel plus one day of operations. Tally up all of the pages describing these ops and it *feels* like it's about 15% of the book.The rest of the book contains multiple long conversations with, or about, Faith and how she needs to work with the new Marines from Gitmo. Finally, the author makes it crystal clear that Faith would have *no chance* at actually being a Marine in the old world because she couldn't hack it physically or scholastically. She's a good fit for fighting zombies, but she won't be officer material for another 5+ years. Whew, glad some characters finally admitted this.There is also a completely superfluous sub-plot regarding the contestants of "Survivor: Caribbean" getting rescued after months and months of being locked in an old spy station on the island. Ringo loves his gorgeous ladies, so we get a bunch of useless pages (because the story is so repetitive from prior books) describing how they survived, and now they pull the whole "Do you know who I am?" crap once rescued. It beggars belief that after 6+ months of hand-to-mouth survival that this particular attitude would also survive. This is 5-10% of the book where we didn't need the detail and the ideas have already been covered in prior books (Ishman, Hollywood exec who spanks Faith, etc.).And ultimately, that's my main beef with the book. The plot could have advanced quite a bit more but instead we are treated to more Marine PT, more Marine drama with Faith, chapters wasted on describing a rather dull trip from the Canaries to Gitmo, more of the same descriptions of clearing towns (we had a whole book of this in book 2), and other minutia. We get a (nearly) daily journal of events when it would be better to have entire weeks or months pass between chapters. I fully anticipate Ringo will be tired of this story long before the final chapters are delivered (see his "Troy Rising" series).