Even White Trash Zombies Get the Blues
Diana Rowland's second installment in the White Trash Zombie series made me happy.
There are a lot of things to like in this book. I'll start with the character voice, since it runs all the way through. Even White Trash Zombies Get The Blues is related in first person, from the perspective of an acknowledged screw-up named Angel who only managed to get her life under some semblance of control after she was (secretly, without her permission, in the first book) turned into a zombie. The voice rings true. The self-loathing, the doubt, the despair are all out front, and they serve as stark contrast for the pride, the hope, and the heroism. It's a tough sell when your protagonist is three missed meals away from being a monster, but I like Angel a lot.
The police procedural bits of this book are also excellent. Rowland has done that sort of work in the past, and where lesser authors (or TV writers) will try to pull a fast one for the sake of the plot, Rowland has the years of experience (and the good taste) to provide better.
Finally, the mythos is fun. We learned a lot about this particular flavor of zombie-ism in the first book, My Life as a White Trash Zombie, and the sequel does a good job of extending it. There'll be a third book, clearly, but this one ends satisfactorily with no cliffhanger and few very promising, very tasty loose ends.
My only two complaints: First, I think the word "prion" gets abused a little bit. Second, Rowland has to hide POV character knowledge from us in Act III. That second bit is really difficult to NOT have to do in a first person narrative. I gave it a pass because Rowland so expertly skewered a half-dozen other tropes. And honestly, the way it was presented, the part of my brain responsible for tracking story structure kept trying to guess what had been hidden. It was fun being half-right.
Even White Trash Zombies Get the Blues will have you rooting for the shambling undead, and hoping they get a nice, grey meal soon.
(Oh, and I cannot get enough of Dan Dos Santos' cover art on this series. Perfect!)