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The novel opens with Malcolm, a newly made zombie whom everyone loved to hate before and after he died, flying from an open window in his home, causing the police to put the entire city of London into lockdown. Fairbrother does a marvelous job of never letting the action slow down from that point on, for an exciting read through the living, the dead, the underworld, and everything in between.
Our main heroine, Vivia Brisk, is a death hag witch employed by the Lipscombe Trust for her special talent of dying. Yes, dying. A genetic talent passed through her long living dead mother, Vivia literally dies, starts the decomposition process from the inside to out, and visits the underworld on assignment in order to glean information from the dead which she is then able to stop decomposing, reanimate, and apply her new knowledge to living real life police work and mystery solving. Trading for information with ghosts, Vivia unravels complex clues and old magic spells to decipher a decades old family skeleton in the closet. By traversing the River Styx multiple times, she is even capable to bring the dead back to the living.
In this reviewer’s opinion, Fairbrother masterfully managed to employ a new twist on the hot new zombiepocolypse trend with the death hag witch character and abilities. Subtleties worked into the text are descriptions of talents and fictional society enhanced rather than subtracted the definitions of magic. Although the market is currently flooded by this morbid death-zombie-magic-supernatural fascination, I found the novel to be different from the deluge, fresh in angle, and action packed.
Overall, I would give this a 3 out of 4 stars. I loved this book, but I have to subtract off my 4 star score as this review felt the book was too short at 184 pages and the conclusion clearly was written with room for an additional novel, and this reviewer personally, has grown weary of the series books. I miss the days of the stand-alone novel that I realize is marketing and publishing, but I would like to see a story be just that, “A” story. That being said, knowing the elements of this book and the talent of the author, I would more than likely read a second installment.
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