John Ringo's Black Tide Rising series is a page-turner to be sure, and it introduces a few new ideas into the zombie apocalypse genre. There's enough biology up front to make the whole thing at least sci-fi plausible, some interesting questions about the ethics and legality of shooting zombies are raised, aspects of the economics of how to keep a zombie killin' effort going for the long term are introduced, along with the repercussions of working with remnants of the military and government. Sounds interesting right? And it is to a point, but with a story this big, John Ringo has to introduce some outsized characters, and just one Mary Sue is not enough so he's written in two of them. Here, here's a link to TV Tropes detailing all the stock characters and plotting devices therein. It's not really a spoiler, but it will give you a better idea of what's going on here.
Meh, it's summer and the series was a good page-turner with just enough brains and I had a lot of fun reading it. Call it 3 out of 5 stars. It's just that after plowing through all four books in quick succession, you know that feeling of starting a bag of spicy potato chips and not stopping? It's soooo good while it's going, but when it's over, there's a little bit of a spice-and-salt hangover? Yeah, just like that.
Both come in four varieties. This is not a coincidence. OTOH, comparing to Zapp's chips is pretty high praise.
There are a couple of related anthologies from various authors, and I might get to those sometime before this summer's over, but only if the beer is cold. There's also an extension of the series, largely by another author ("with John Ringo") that I'm going to take a pass on.
