Review: Flip This Zombie (Living with the Dead #2) by Jesse Petersen

Flip This Zombie by Jesse Petersen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the second book in a series about a married couple during a zombie apocalypse. In the last one, Sarah and David save their marriage by escaping a zombie-infested Seattle together.

In Flip This Zombie, Sarah and David have the zombie killing down. They're spending the winter in Phoenix, Arizona, and building a brand off their ability to slay zombies for those who are less practiced. Then, there are rumors of a strain of super zombies Sarah dubs "bionics," and they're hired to capture zombies in an attempt to find a cure.

Like Married with Zombies, this is told through Sarah's perspective, framed like a self-help book of starting a business after the zombie apocalypse. Sarah is funny and snarky, though not entirely self-aware. Her perspective works in this book, though, and you may find yourself feeling like you're watching a horror movie: "Look behind you, Sarah! He's right behind you!" It's nothing that cliché, but the reader does figure out a few things before Sarah does.

That's okay. The plot still has plenty of surprises.

The book is funny and fluffy, though there are places where it lacks polish. There's a little too much reliance on dialogue for exposition, and there's one conversation that's repeated almost word-for-word. There are places where it feels like we're back in book one, with the characters' marriage teetering on the brink. While that plot point is there to ramp up the tension, it irritated me for taking away the one constant I thought I could rely on. The book changes so many of the other rules that I hoped that one might stay as it was.

Overall, I enjoyed the second installment in the Living with the Dead series. It preserves the tone of the first book, and, despite how much the characters have learned and grown, still makes us worry they might not make it. The ending is immensely satisfying, and leads quite well into the third installment without feeling like a middle book.

I listened to this book an audio, read by Cassandra Campbell. While some of her pronunciation is odd, she has a good speaking voice, and is easy to understand. She's able to capture Sarah's snark without sounding snotty or irritating, which is a skill in itself. While the characters all have similar accents, she finds subtle inflections that make each character's dialogue easy to distinguish.


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