Top positive review
4.0 out of 5 stars5* for the book, 3* for the trilogy
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 February 2014
The book itself is worthy of 5*, it's your standard zombie apocalypse fare, with the shotgun armed protagonists eking a living by scavenging the remains of civilization and headshotting any feral plague infected zombies they meet along the way.
But it is very well executed and the addition of details like parajumping into zombie infested locations via sub-orbital military dropships give it a nice futuristic feel. The story is fleshed out with a potential extra-terrestrial origin for the zombie plague and a mysterious alien built space elevator that has an unknown but pivotal role in the whole affair.
Unfortunately this isn't a stand alone book. It's part of a trilogy - and the trilogy ends itself on a note which could lead to future novels. Unfortunately the quality of the books drop as the story progresses and by the end the whole narrative just feels tired and limps to an unsatisfying conclusion.
It almost feels like the author has spun two books worth of plot out into three (quite long) books and in the meantime hasn't paid enough attention to how he was going to end the whole thing. Despite the fact the trilogy is (arguably) too long the ending feels rushed and many plot points are left hanging and unexplained. It reminds me a bit of the TV series Lost - the author gives us lots of cool scenes which pose more and more questions about the whole ET/Zombie mystery but then in the end all the questions are dismissed/ignored and no satisfying answers are given.
Perhaps these are to come in a future trilogy but by now I no longer trust the author to deliver them and am unwilling to invest the time to find out. For me a drip feed of answers to at least some of the questions and an indication that the book is more than a load of cool scenes strung together - that there is a satisfying overarching story that is going to link it all together - is needed.
So 5* for the book itself and the concept but I couldn't really recommend anyone who wasn't a massive space zombie fan taking on the trilogy as a whole - so 3* for the trilogy, 4* overall.