Red Hill

"With all the television shows, comics, books, and movies about the undead, it shouldn't have been a surprise that somebody was finally both smart and crazy enough to try and make it a reality. I know the world ended on a Friday. It was the last day I saw my children."

Scarlet, a single mom, is at work at the hospital when it all begins; her two daughters are with her ex-husband. Now all she can think about is finding her daughters and getting them to safety at Red Hill Ranch.

"I couldn't do this if I wasn't with them. I needed to see Jenna roll her eyes at me again, and for Halle to interrupt me. They needed me to tell them that everything would be okay. We couldn't survive the end of the world without each other. I didn't want to."

Miranda and her sister, Ashley (and their two boyfriends) are also trying to get to Red Hill Ranch. It's their father's country house and a beckoning sanctuary from all the chaos and violence surrounding them. But they're miles away, and the roads are clogged with cars, terrified people...and zombies.

"We passed more people, unsure of who was running and who was chasing. A couple of times people screamed at me to stop, begged me to help them, but stopping always meant dying in the movies, and I was barely eighteen. I wasn't sure how long we would survive, but I knew I wasn't dying on day one of the f**king zombie apocalypse."

Nathan's wife chose this day of all days to leave him. Now it's up to him to keep his young daughter, Zoe, safe. But how is he supposed to do that when nothing in the world is safe, or even sane, any more?

"Watching a movie about zombies is one thing. Watching zombies outside your windows was another. The movies didn't talk about that...how terrifying each moment truly was. I tried not to think about tomorrow, or that we would still be fighting for our lives every day from now on. I glanced back at Zoe, and choked back the sadness welling up in my throat. I didn't want her to grow up in a world like this."

Page-turning action and suspense, along with some pretty good characters, make this novel by Jamie McGuire a better-than-average zombie read. I was rooting for the whole group to survive. (Never a realistic hope in any zombie novel; someone you like always dies!) The first half reads the best; the story slows a bit towards the end, especially in regards to Scarlett and her daughters. Overall, though this novel offers lots of tension and violence, smart survival, sad deaths, humor, friendship and hope.

Happy Reading!