2014 urban fantasy, fourth of its series. Angel Crawford is still a
zombie (subtype conscious and super-strong, though still
cerebrivorous), and things seem to be going all right, but several of
her allies get kidnapped by the evil corporation…
I don't get it. It's only been about three months since I read
the previous book, and I enjoyed that enough to keep the series on my
rotation list, but this time… it seemed all greyed-out. All the same
sorts of thing were happening as before, but there was more and more
clag getting in the way, more obstruction slowing down the pace of
actual story development.
Here's Angel utterly lacking confidence again, and still doing
something awesome. Here's another completely un-foreshadowed power
that this world's zombies can have. Here's the psychotic boss of the
evil corporation being generically psychotic. Here's a road trip.
Here's Angel, having last book reconciled with her deadbeat alcoholic
father, reconciling with her deadbeat druggie ex-boyfriend. (Why is
this a good thing?) Here are yet more hot guys falling in love with
Angel, to which she's entirely oblivious. Oh, and here's a great big
new problem for Angel introduced in the closing paragraphs.
It's all stuff happening but the people who come out of this story,
considered in terms of their personality rather than their skills and
powers, are basically the same people who went into it, and that's not
what I want from an ongoing series.
I very much enjoyed the first book. I liked Angel's journey of
supernatural discovery without a great big zombie society to hold
her hand; I also liked her journey of mundane discovery, going back
to school and getting her GED and sorting out her life in small ways,
rather than getting on first-name terms with a Congresswoman. The rest
of the series hasn't provided more of the bits I liked, and I probably
shan't read another.
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