Better Red than Dead
The unwelcome guests from last episode’s cliffhanger have moved in permanently, and all the scattered swimmers are accounted for, if not reunited, in this volume, which provides all the excitement and zombie carnage we’ve come to expect from V Plague. I had to put it down at one point where it looked like John and his team weren’t going to make it back from their current pickle unscathed.
For the first time in the series, there is no star-crossed mass civilian evac (though there is a small nutjob liberation mission); the main adventure here is a covert ops mission to liberate some technology from behind enemy lines, which, of course, goes awry. There’s also an ominous side dish of military bureaucracy failing badly.
But what goes most awry is the slowly peaking third wave of the outbreak, which strikes random characters when you least expect it. The cliffhanger is of the end-of-a-horror-movie sequel-promising sort, rather than the toss-the-cast-into-the-river do-they-live sort.