A review by hlizmarie
Dead City by Joe McKinney

2.0

Eddie Hudson, a police officer, is responding to a regular call of a fight in progress only to get attacked by people who don't respond to pepper spray, shouted orders or getting shot. So begins a harrowing night while Officer Hudson fights his way through the city and hordes of zombies to find his wife and infant son. A lot of the book seems pretty standard to me. There are some great moments where you're biting your nails wondering how he's going to get out of this mess but then there are some moments that made no sense to me. The start of the novel is most effective since it's always horrible to read through the slow process of everyone figuring out what's going on. Unfortunately as the book went on and the gore really kept piling up it had less of an impact. The character of Marcus in particular bothered me. As an old partner of Eddie's I expected something other than a class clown in the midst of these horrors but Marcus is exactly that. At one point he starts flirting with a random reporter and tries to save her only to let her get eaten in the back of their own patrol car! After her leg gets ripped off they make a crack about it being a shame since she had great legs. As our narrator and his allies got desensitized to the violence so did I and that's not what I was looking for. I want to be horrified to the end and this didn't deliver.