Review: Better Than The First One
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 07 13, 2013
The author promised a more polished and professional product for this go 'round, and boy howdy, did he deliver!  Mechanically well constructed and very well edited, it contains only one or two minor annoyances (mostly unnecessary use of italics or capitalization for emphasis where emphasis is not appropriate) - but I'm being picky.The action flows well and quickly, and the blood and gore is sufficiently illustrative without going over the top just for blood and gore's sake.  The characters are well developed, and the author provides some very interesting back story on several of the key players (although I did feel that Hubber's dream sequence went on too long; the author could probably have cut it by about half without losing any impact).  The author also expands upon several scenes from the first book, and shows how they fit and why they're critical to the storyline.The only suspension of disbelief issue I had was with the zombies (albeit a lot of them, and all at once) defeating jail cell bars and shipboard watertight doors - literally ripping them out of the concrete or smashing them off their hinges - and  what went on with Zombie Tom at the end of the book.However, none of this is inconsistent with what the author has shown us of his zombies thus far, and he does provide a reasonable explanation for both the genesis of the ZA (Zombie Apocalypse), and why some of the zombies possess physical abilities and levels of cognition somewhat outside the zombie canon.None of these objections were show-stoppers, and as the zombie genre evolves, no doubt so too will the canon.Okay, short version: The first book was good. This one has everything you liked about the first one - and then some - with better presentation and technical execution.  It provides a good set up for the next book, and I'll buy that one too.  Let's see what you've got, Mr. Rand.