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The more I read this one, the more I disliked it. I'm usually a pretty forgiving reader and try to engage with a book on it's own terms, but, even bending over backwards in an attempt to forgive it's many sins, I just couldn't do it.

Right out of the gate, I didn't like the twin protagonists (who should really have been named Mary Sue & Gary Sue) - so perfect, so creepy, so self-important. After a while, it felt like the book existed just to serve as a vehicle for their "snappy banter", which was meant to have been amusing, but was really just painful.

The world of zombie zones, blogger news sites and endless testing just didn't feel at all authentic. The attempt to put the existance of zombies on some sort of solid scientific footing felt like it was completely undercut by the fact that zombies get smarter if there are more of them together. The fear of a false positive (and it's dire consequences) that accompanied every zombie blood test got old really, really quickly. The endless testings, together with the panoply of testing kits with quality ranging from fair to perfect made it seem like the snake-eyes false positive was going to happen on practically every page, but it never did. (I suppose Grant is saving it for a future book).

It's hard to pick out the worst aspect of the book, but the repetition and the padding is near the top of the list. It's a 600 page book that could easily have been cut to under 200 pages. The endless breathless tone didn't help either. It was used in an attempt to heighten suspense, but it had the opposite effect for me.

The central casting "Villain" was ludicrously awful. (SPOILER ALERT) It was immediately obvious when he was introduced that he was the villian - a complete caricature. Somewhat early in the book, our heroes had enough evidance to confront him, but managed to dither about until the end of the book. When finally confronted, our villain, instead of denying it like the master politician he is, can't wait to confess and brag about it. Then, for no reason at all, he injects himself with zombie juice, forcing our remaining hero to shoot him. Actually, I guess that that was the reason - it allowed our hero to shoot him in cold blood with a clear conscience.

Perhaps the only thing that was done well in the book was the fairly unexpected twist near the end.

It's discouraging that this book is so well liked. I'm not looking forward to reading the next two...