A woman with no direction in her life finds it once she becomes undead in Diana Rowland's "My Life as a White Trash Zombie."
Angel works a series of dead-end jobs and spends her freetime with her loser boyfriend and dodging her alcoholic father. But when Angel is found along a road dying of a drug overdose after a car accident, her she wakes up ... different. She isn't injured from the wreck. She receives a strange note telling her she has a job at the county morgue as a driver and a case of some sort of strange energy drinks. Figuring it's some sort of "scared straight" program, Angel takes the job and finds she actually likes it and is good at it. There might be a reason to stick around after all. And while Angel used to have a weak stomach at the sight of blood, now she only feels hunger at seeing brains. And when her mysterious benefactor sends her a note about her cravings - Angel accepts her new reality. She is a zombie and must eat brains in order to survive. And she isn't the only one in her area.
But when zombies start ending up dead, Angel must figure out who is after her, all while keeping her new "habit" a secret from her coworkers.
This is a completely different take on all of the zombie books in the genre - while Angel does crave brains, she still maintains her personality and humanity. Much like vampires trying to find a blood source, Angel is just looking for a brain source, and trying to stay alive from those who fear her. She's a human "monster," with a problematic past and is actually quite endearing. Her job as a driver for the county morgue is actually quite interesting and the story behind that and the mystery of the dead bodies would be entertaining even without the zombie stuff. It's the start of a great new series and will have readers dying to see what's next for Angel.
"My Life as a White Trash Zombie" is published by Daw. It is $7.99 and is 320 pages long.
Alex is still dealing with the fallout from her previous adventure in Kalayna Price's "Grave Dance."
Alex Craft works solving murders by speaking to the dead with her powers. But when she gets called to case where the police are finding body parts instead of bodies, Alex has no idea that this case holds a link to her past and could put everyone she cares about in danger.
When Alex killed the evil Coleman and stopped his magically eternal dance, setting free his prisoners, she inherited his property in the Faerie. His property includes her childhood friend, Rianna, who had been his prisoner. Rianna presses Alex to take his properities in Faerie to decide her fate. Meanwhile, Alex is still trying to solve the mystery of the body parts and it keeps drawing her back to Faerie, with magical beasts attacking her and her friends. All of these ties leads her back to her old boyfriend, Fae Investigation Bureau agent, Falin Andrews, and the Winter Queen's lover. Reuniting with Falin brings back all sorts of feelings for Alex. But with danger all around her, and Death literally popping in for coffee, Alex has no time to be distracted. Because she has unwittingly unleashed something evil that could destroy everything...
This is an interesting world in which Death takes on the personification of a handsome man that may or may not have feelings for Alex and the world is aware of the magic that surrounds them. Alex seems to be on the path for some more pulse-pounding adventures to intrigue readers.
"Grave Dance" is published by Roc. It is $7.99 and 400 pages long.
New York Times bestselling author MaryJanice Davidson returns with another story about vampire Queen Betsy Taylor in "Undead and Undermined."
When we last left Betsy, she had just gotten back from a time-traveling adventure with her possibly evil half-sister Laura, that changed the course of events for everyone. Now, Betsy's best friend, Jessica, is largely pregnant by officer Dick. Except in Betsy's original timeline, Jessica and he had broken up a long time ago and his name was Nick. And then Betsy's friend, Garrett, who was dead in her world, walks in, and another friend, Marc, shows up as an evil vampire from a future timeline. While Betsy's busy trying to sort everything out in this new world she has inadvertently created, Laura comes back, commits a random act of theft, and the two sisters are soon scratching at each other, quite literally. With the world turned upside down, and a future Betsy is determined to prevent, is she going to be able to save the day like usual? Or have things gone too far already?
Betsy and her friends are still hysterical and always ready to quip in the face of danger. The previously always-cheery-despite-the-mayhem storyline took a big hit in the last book, and there seems to be the possibility of that cheeriness coming back. The author at the beginning of this book acknowledges that this is the second part of a three book "trilogy" so I guess fans will have to hang in there to see what fate has in store for Betsy when the next book, "Undead and Unstable" comes out.
"Undead and Undermined" is published by Berkley. It is $25.95 and 279 pages long.
Contact Amy Phelps at aphelps@newsandsentinel.com
