Book Log #99: The Down Home Zombie Blues, by Linnea Sinclair

[annathepiper]

"But Anna," I hear you cry, "What happened to Harry Potter?" Fret not--this is simply the result of not wanting to take spazzkat's hardbacks out of the house, while at the same time not wanting to go without something to read on the bus, either. Rest assured I'm still working on finishing the Potter series. It'll just be that Deathly Hallows won't be book #100. Oh well. ;)

And as it happens, Linnea Sinclair's The Down Home Zombie Blues was actually a bit of a welcome break after the Harry Potter read-a-thon I've been on. It calls itself a romance on the spine--but don't hold that against it. For me, it read like a good solid love story as well as a halfway decent little skiffy one, and I think I actually like it better than the previous Sinclair I've read this year.

We have your basic covert First Contact plot here, in which Earth or at least a tiny fraction of the population thereof discovers that holy shit there's an entire spacefaring civilization out there, and not only that, but part of it's sending killer critters down onto the planet. Florida police sergeant Theo Petrakos meets up with Guardian Force Commander Jorie Mikkalah, and I'm tellin' ya, it was a refreshing change of pace to see a romance in which the involved parties never have hugely stupid misunderstandings that leave them snarky at one another for half the book. There's no time for that crap here--Theo and Jorie, after all, have a planet to save. Creatures called zombies--not to be confused with the shambling, brain-consuming undead, but rather, critters that were originally engineered to guard the transit Hatches used by the aforementioned spacefaring civilization but which have now gone horribly, horribly wrong--are on the loose. Worse yet, they may have been hijacked by the enemies of Jorie's people, who are themselves at large on the planet.

Critter hunting ensues. Things go splody. Theo swears a lot in Greek, and both he and Jorie have snarky things to say about their exes, and in between laser battles and some surprisingly well-handled bringing in of Theo's superiors on the crisis at hand, we also get smooching and sexx0rs. All in all the romance was in just about the exact right balance for me with the bigger story, and all in all I enjoyed it quite a bit. Four stars.

Comments

[seimaisin.livejournal.com]

Glad to hear a good review on this one! I've seen Sinclair's name on the shelves, and I've heard good things from varying sources, but there was something about the titles of her books that made me unsure what I'd find inside. This sounds fun, though, I may have to check it out!

[annathepiper]

Yeah, I had the same initial misgivings as you. But hey, SF romance! What's not to like? ^_^

Also, it was really relieving that nobody at any point in the plot was excessively or even a little bit stupid. There's one bit where a side character does something that's... ill-advised, but he gets an adequate smackdown for it from the heroine.

[tvaddictgurl.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about picking this one up. When I finally have some money in my book budget again I'll have to put this toward the top of the list.

[annathepiper]

Cool, hope you enjoy it. I will probably seek out more of Sinclair's books; I was kind of half-eying a few more of them anyway, since the first of hers I'd read wasn't too bad either.