The Down Home Zombie Blues by Linnea Sinclair

I’m usually not a huge fan of sci-fi romance. I do love Linnea Sinclair, though. After reading this post on Nalini Singh’s blog, I couldn’t resist giving it a try. I am so glad I did. I think Games of Command was one of my Top 5 books of 2007.

Please also note that my geography is so bad that I thought Bahia Vista was a made up futuristic city. Pathetic, isn’t it?

Onto the review…

Commandor Jorie Milkkalah has never had confidence in nils. Nils is what Jorie and her people refer to humans as. See, this book takes place in the present. No one (well, maybe 1 or 2 people) have any idea that there are “visitors” among Earthlings. Theo Petrakos sure didn’t. Not until Jorie shows up in his backyard, a weird green portal opens up and Jorie throws him a laser gun and tells him to shoot at a zombie. Even after that, he’s still incredulous. That all changes when Jorie and Theo are beamed up to her ship and Theo is told that he’s never going home again. He’s going to be sent to a place called Paroo where apparently humans are sent if they somehow find out about their visitors. Crazy, huh?

Theo won’t take that lying down. Who would want to leave their job, their family, their life? Come on. So Theo convinces Jorie in a round about way that he can help her search for these zombies. See, zombies were created to be these insentient beings that would do what they were created for and that would be that. The best laid plans and all that. The zombies soon started thinking for themselves. Now Jorie and her people have been trying to hunt down all the zombies for over 200 years. The zombies have brought her to Earth where it is imperative that she remains undetected by either zombie or human alike. So she falls for Theo’s subtle prompting and gets her Captain to agree to let Theo return home and take Jorie and her team with her. They now have the perfect cover, living with a nil.

There’s a lot of good stuff that happens in between the hunt for the zombies. Jorie thinks that someone is programming the zombies to kill. She doesn’t buy the fact that they’re doing everything on their own. She thinks the evil faction called the Tresh are behind the zombies uprising. She can’t get anyone to believe her though, because of her own hellish past with the Tresh. It’s not long before the only person Jorie has left is the nil, Theo. The last thing Jorie ever expected was to end up fighting zombies with a human.

I really did enjoy this book, though not as much as Games of Command. Honest to God, I could feel Theo’s frustration when Jorie told him that he would never be going home. Linnea Sinclair did a perfect job of getting his desperation, despair, and anger across. It was really wrenching. I think she also did a good job of getting Jorie’s feelings across. This is someone that is in command of people and now she’s like a fish out of water. Not only is the place unfamiliar, but she has to accept help from a race that she has always considered inferior.

Though I do recommend this book, please read Games of Command first.

4 out of 5.