Status Updates From Twice as Dead (City of Shad...

The ending started getting predictable at about the last quarter of the story- but there wasn't really anywhere else for it to go, so Turtledove kinda painted himself into a corner.

Suing a labor company for "recruiting" a man forcibly into zombie form and pawning him off to work a hard labor job for a big company...nope, no real-world parallels here. ;->

The writing is rather clumsily in some places- definitely not on par with the majority of Turtledove works.

Also interesting: coercing poor/desperate people- or kidnapping them- to become zombies so as to create a low--cost labor force that doesn't ask questions (or answer any!).

Interesting concepts: magic-sourced "wiretapping" of spoken words, and the talking cat repeatedly catches rats that are recruited as *spies* for the enemies of the main character; they try to access the character's file cabinets before the cat snags, interrogates, and kills them.

Less interesting: falling in love with a vampire. This book was published barely a year ago- are we not tired of this theme by now?

There is a *lot* of supernatural, mystical-magical saturation in this world...it's kinda distracting.

Vampires, sassy talking cats, city directories that have phone "numbers" made out of letters, numbers or even Roman numerals...this should be a fun one. :->

Great

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Great