It starts in the same way as Feed, with someone poking a zombie with a stick but soon departs in a different direction. If you haven’t read Feed yet, then this review will contain spoilers for the first book in the trilogy.

The narration moves to Shaun in this instalment. I think the man we see from his point of view is different from the one George saw and described in Feed. Maybe we can let him off as he’s having a tough time getting over the loss of his sister, although she’s not completely gone; Shaun has started to hear her voice in his head. He’s aware he’s most likely crazy but that doesn’t stop him trying to get to the bottom of the conspiracy which got her killed.

Whereas Feed dealt with the evolution of news reporting and spread of information, Deadline doesn’t have any strong message other than the need for answers. There’s a lot of repetition, I lost count of the times Shaun explained about his craziness or that he just doesn’t care what other people think. The novel is over 500 pages long and it could have easily lost 200 of them and been a better book. Considering they’re running round avoiding the CDC and zombies, it all felt a little slow and that wasn’t helped by the desire to slap the whining out of Shaun.

And as for those zombies, they didn’t really feature much. It was much more about the Kellis-Amberlee virus which in itself is interesting but didn’t have a strong enough plot to carry it. There’s an event which occurs nearer the end which I would have loved brought forward as it suddenly became gripping and there were all these unanswered questions swirling round in my head. Though I kind of saw the actual ending coming.

Saying all that, I will be reading Blackout when it’s released. I like the world that was created in Feed and I want to know what happens next…