Deadline (Newsflesh, #2)

by Mira Grant

[Melanie]

4.5 stars

My review and an extended sample of the audiobook are posted at Hotlistens.com.

I’ve not read a lot of zombie books. I have watched a ton of zombie movies and TV shows. This series is nothing like anything that I’ve read or watched. I will say that I think this is a series that I think would make a great zombie movie series or TV show. It is just so different from the other things we’ve seen.

First and foremost, this series takes place 20 years after “The Rising” when zombies first appeared. So, society has moved on and we can see how the world is once the world gets over dealing with zombies. Zombies are still a problem, but civilization knows how to deal with them. This series follows bloggers who tell the news. Journalist in the traditional sense are trusted because they didn’t come right out and share everything they knew about zombies during The Rising, which could’ve saved some lives. Bloggers did, hence now bloggers are a more trusted news source. This series follows a group of bloggers who follow a conspiracy and want to get the truth out to the world.

**WARNING — There are spoilers for book one of the Newsflesh series beyond this point**

There will be no spoilers for this book, Deadline, only for Feed, Newsflesh book 1.

It has been two years since Georgia Mason’s death. Shaun Mason is lost without his sister. But he really isn’t without her completely. She still lives inside him. He talks to her all day long. They have conversations. The people around Shaun have gotten used to him talking to George. There are even times in this book where they even ask for George’s opinion on certain matters.

Shaun is still running the blog, but he is surviving. You can tell he really isn’t living or thriving at all. He has a new crew that is helping him. They’re a good crew. There’s Rebecca, or Becks as she’s called, who is now running the Irwins. Irwins are named after Steve Irwin. They like to put themselves in danger and like to poke zombies with sticks. Shaun was an Irwin before George’s death. Alaric is a newbie who is still working on his license. He is a newsie. He will focus on the news just like George used to do. Dave is another blogger who also had a tech background. Mahir who took over running the newies when George died. We met him in Feed. He runs them from England. Lastly, there’s Maggie who runs the fictionals. She writes mostly poetry and about old horror movies from before The Rising.
There are other characters that we meet like Dr. Kelly and Dr. Abby. Both of these doctors have been studying the Kellis-Amberlee virus. Dr. Kelly worked for the CDC and Dr. Abby worked for her own underground lab. They both give Shaun and the team some hard truths about the virus. We learn a lot about Kellis-Amberlee in this story and even more about the conspiracy surrounding it.

This story is one that is slow to build as the author introduces us to all the new characters. She also wanted to take some time to set the tone of Shaun’s mental state. That doesn’t mean that the story was boring by any means. It was still a very interesting story, just not as fast paced as it gets as the story moves past the halfway point. It was glued to my earbuds throughout the entire story, but I wanted them implanted by the time I got to the last third of the book. And the last 5 minutes there is quite the bomb dropped. You better believe that I will picking up Blackout soon.

Narration
books, but these two narrators did a good job with the narration of this book. It was still done in the same style as the previous book. Chris Patton did the majority of the narration, since the book is told mostly from Shaun’s POV. Patton also narrated any blog posts written by any of the male bloggers. Nell Geislinger narrated any blog posts or emails written by any females characters. Both of these narrators are new-to-me, but I would be willing to listen to them again. I didn’t get to listen to Geislinger do any voices or anything, since she really just read post and emails. Patton did a great job with voices of both males and females.