Alice in Deadland

What started out promising and interesting quickly turned stupid and ill thought out. The concept is a fun one, Alice in Wonderland but with zombies. That's how the book was sold, it's what the goodreads synopsis says, what's on the back of the novel and what the positive reviews write. It couldn't be more wrong. 

It does start out that way though. It's post apocalyptical, Alice has never known any world but the zombie infested or "biter" world than this. She was born shortly after the world fell apart and has trained since her birth to stay alive and shoot "biters" in the head, only way to kill them. 

One day while on gaurd duty she sees a biter with crazy bunny ears jump into a hole and out of site from her rifle. Ignoring all her training and instincts, she follows the bunny eared biter into the hole. See the forced similarity to the original story? It's basically forcing it down the readers throat! Once she is down the hole. She finds herself surrounded by biters, but rather than kill her they being her to their Queen. 

The Queen has with her a copy of Alice and Wonderland, and tries to convince Alice it is a book of prophesy. The Queen believes that humans and the biters can live I. Harmony, and that Alice is the key to peace on Earth once more. 

If the novel wasn't horrible enough at this point, it gets worse!  Alice and the biters head back to her camp, but Zeus a military camp headed by a mix of old world commanders wants the biters killed. Alice now believes that this whole new world was orchestrated years before her birth by an old Chinese government to rid the world of undesirables and start a more evolved one. 

This novel explains little, leaving plot holes and unanswered questions. No, I will not be reading the rest of the series even though they were purchased in a set with the first. Please save yourself the trouble, time and money and don't read this book. 

Silent Echo by JR Rain

Jimmy Booker is dying. The once highly sought after private detective is on death’s door, living

on borrowed time since the doctors gave him six months to live more than eight months ago. Jimmy is perfectly content to live his last few days sitting in the sun drinking lattes with his best friend. But while Jimmy is content to spend his last few days doing nothing, his childhood friend Eddie and the LAPD have other plans.

            Eddie’s wife has been murdered, but what draws Jimmy back to the world of crime and investigation is that Olivia was killed in the exact same manner that Jimmy’s little brother Matt was killed. While investigating, interviewing witnesses, and analyzing crime photos is taking its toll on the already weakened Jimmy, he won’t give up. Especially when another victim turns up less than a week later.

            Something is off, Jimmy knows that if he wasn’t sick he would be able to figure it out. Its taking him a while to put all the pieces together, but time is running out for Jimmy and the cases. Will Jimmy be able to figure it out before he takes his last breath, or will his disease overtake him before he solves the case?

            This book was… pretty bad. I will be honest and say that it was a freeby from Amazon, otherwise I would have returned it. The writing was to redundant, and the characters kind of flat. Numi, Jimmy’s caretaker uses the same phases over and over, and for a book that has less than 200 pages characters that seem do use the same joke over and over makes the book seem like it just repeated itself over and over. Plus, Jimmy’s social worker ends up sleeping with him, talk about bad form. It was like the author was just trying to force a romance into a novel that didn’t need it.

            Now, the parts of the book that I actually enjoyed were the parts involving the actual mystery. I think that J.R. Rain should focus more on the actual thriller-mystery part of his novels rather than the other stuff. I personally wouldn’t recommend this book to others, but if Rain focused more on the mystery in his novels I would be willing to give him another shot.