The Down Home Zombie Blues
by Linnea Sinclair
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Book Summary Information
Author: Linnea SinclairEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-11-27
ISBN: 0553589644
Number of pages: 516
Publisher: Bantam
Book Reviews of The Down Home Zombie Blues
Book Review: In which Cyborg Health and Safety inspectors run amok ...
Summary: 4 Stars
If I had to compile a short-list of three nominations for the science fiction writer who has improved most over the past two years, "Games of Command" would have earned Linnea Sinclair a place on it and this book would have put her at the top.
The title, and particularly the word "Zombies," is misleading. This is Sci-Fi, not horror. The basis of the plot is that soldiers from an advanced civilisation in another galaxy come to earth to eliminate a group of rogue monsters hiding on our planet, before the monsters can become a greater threat to all intelligent life and incidentally wipe out the human race in the process.
The monsters, despite being called "zombies" are nothing like what we usually associate with that word: they are not re-animated dead people. They are artificial biomechanical organisms which were originally created to check interstellar ships and travellers for disease. These Zombies started out like automated cyborg customs Health & Infectious Disease Control inspectors. Unfortunately an upgrade designed to give them more autonomy went radically wrong. The Zombies stopped accepting any orders at all, became killers, and started reproducing like rabbits anywhere they could hide and obtain food.
At the start of this book a contingent of "Guardians" led by Commander Jorie Mikkalah arrives on a primitive planet in another galaxy "named by its inhabitants after dirt" to hunt a herd of Zombies. Their civilisation had put an agent on the planet to carry out an initial investigation of the zombies but the agent has stopped communicating and they are afraid that the zombies may have found and killed him.
Meanwhile Detective Sergeant Theo Petrakos, in charge of a homicide team for the Bahia Vista police in Florida, has just started to investigate the most peculiar case of his life. The victim has been mummified but has a wrecked flat full of strange high-tech equipment such as a laptop with a screen with readouts in an alphabet which nobody recognises.
On his way home Theo wonders what sort of attack leaves a man who was alive two days ago looking like he's been dead for a thousand years and what sort of victim has a computer which looks like it's from 200 years in the future. But if he thinks the night has started out strange it's about to get much worse ...
Because the people of earth know nothing about the Zombies and the Guardians know nothing about Earth, circumstances soon force Theo and Jorie to work together to try to stop the Zombies. This also gives them a lot of explaining to do with their colleagues and superiors.
The "Guardians" tracking the Zombies are may be trying to save our world but they are also ruthless and more than a little prejudiced against people from less technologically-advanced planets. And how is Theo going to explain to his boss that the world is threatened by monsters from outer space and he is working with a group of aliens to stop them, without getting put in a mental hospital?
And as if that isn't bad enough, Jorie has reason to suspect that this particular group of Zombies may be even more dangerous than her fellow Guardians believe - but none of them take her concerns seriously ...
The character development, storyline, good use of humour, and gradual development of both dramatic and romantic tension are all first rate. It's a very entertaining read.
Linnea Sinclair's first few sci-fi romance novels started out as entertaining nonsense and improved to highly entertaining nonsense. They won a quite a few awards and award nominations because they were great fun to read, although the science fiction element of the novels was not first rank Sci-fi and the romance element was not exactly Jane Austen.
However, with "Games of Command" (2007), Sinclair managed to jump up a gear in the quality of her plots and character development, and "The Down Home Zombie Blues" jumps up another gear. If she keeps improving at this rate the award nominations she can list may begin to include Hugos and Nebulas.
That's not to say there are not still some silly aspects to the book. This time it is grossly improbable similarities between cultures from different galaxies which are never properly explained. For example, characters in the book from different worlds in different galaxies manage to look sufficiently similar to feel romantic attraction.
English turns out to be so like Vekran, one of the four galactic languages spoken by the Guardians, that they can use Vekran to communicate with the characters from Earth, though not always perfectly - one of the funniest moments in the book, through presumably by accident, is when one of the Guardians starts sounding like Yoda at an inappropriate moment. "Serious injury, she has!"
More of the most amusing sections of the book, this time intentionally, come when Theo quotes to Jorie a few words from "Star Trek." The first time she tells him that nobody can travel as fast as Warp Factor Ten, and the second time "If you must quote Vekran sacred texts, get them right!"
No attempt is made to provide a remotely plausible explanation for these similarities: we're told that a Vekran missionary ship went missing not far from Earth fifty years ago. The explicit inference is that one of the missionaries visited this planet and made some comments which found their way into "Star Trek" scripts, but that still does not explain why English is like Vekran or why people who appear to be descended from evolutionary trees on half a dozen different planets look the same.
Overall, however, this is an excellent read and I recommend it.
If you are interested in reading some of Linnea Sinclair's other books, they include
"Winterfair" (originally published under the name Megan Sybil Baker)
"Finders Keepers"
"Gabriel's Ghost"
"An Accidental Goddess"
"Games of Command" (which is a vastly improved rewrite of a book first published as "Command Performance".)
Summary of The Down Home Zombie Blues
In this steamy, suspenseful new novel from RITA Award?winning author Linnea Sinclair, a dangerously sexy space commander and an irresistibly earthy Florida police detective pair up to save the civilized galaxy . . . but can they save themselves from each other?Bahia Vista homicide detective Theo Petrakos thought he?d seen it all. Then a mummified corpse and a room full of futuristic hardware sends Guardian Force commander Jorie Mikkalah into his life. Before the night?s through, he?s become her unofficial partner?and official prisoner?in a race to save the earth. And that?s only the start of his troubles.
Jorie?s mission is to stop a deadly infestation of biomechanical organisms from using Earth as its breeding ground. If she succeeds, she could save a world and win a captaincy. But she?ll need Theo?s help, even if their unlikely partnership does threaten to set off an intergalactic incident.
Because if she fails, she?ll lose not just a planet and a promotion, but a man who?s become far more important to her than she cares to admit.
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