Wired

Dead Reckoning by Mercedes Lackey

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Here is a test for whether you will like this book:
1) Are you a young woman under 16?
2) If you are over 16, did you like the Wild Wild West movie with Will Smith?
3) Do you know or care about anything in the post-civil war American West?

If you answered yes to the first two, carry on. This book should amuse you. If you answered yes to the third question, well, proceed with caution.

In this Reconstruction west, three very different people fetch up in a small town at the same time. Jett is a woman in disguise, on the hunt for her missing twin brother. For two years, she has ridden as a gunslinger and gambler. Gibbons is an archetypical slightly obsessed inventor who also happens to be a pretty girl traveling alone. And White Fox is a white man adopted as a child by a native tribe, and now making a living as an army scout.

They do not get killed by zombies at this point. Instead, they band together to try to figure out the causes behind the sudden plague of undead, and how to stop them. There are delightful twists and turns and the effective application of the scientific method.

If I had a complaint about this book, it's that it seems slight. I kept wanting a little more introspection about the zombies, but then that lack may be what keeps it from reading as pure horror.

I enjoyed Jett pining for her laces and crinolines after two years of gunbelts, and then realizing that they feel confining and worrisome to her after her freedom.

Read if: You want relatively fluffy non-horrifying zombies. You are craving a book where women have a lot of agency. You are like my son and don't want romance cluttering up your action stories.

Skip if: You're looking for the next FEED. You hated the Wild Wild West movie with Will Smith. You want historical detail.

(If you're looking for awesome Western detail and magic, go read Territory, by Emma Bull. If you want the horrifying implications of contagious zombie-osity, read Feed, by Mira Grant.)



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Dead Reckoning