Deadtown by Nancy Holzner

Genre: Urban Fantasy

Published: 2009

Pages: 326

Rating: 4/5 Crowns

Synopsis: If you were undead, you'd be home by now...

They call it Deadtown: the city's quarantined section for its inhuman and undead residents. Most humans stay far from its borders-but Victory Vaughn, Boston's only professional demon slayer, isn't exactly human.

Review: ZOMBIEEESSSSS!!!  I'm pretty sure most everyone is sick of these right?  They're the new vampire in paranormal and urban fantasy; if someone isn't already writing one based around a zombie they included the 'living impaired' in some other fashion.  Of course that's not the only paranormal creature floating around in Holzner's world, but its the one that drew me first.  I'm a Zombie fanatic, truthfully I'd be happy if there were more Zombie related books (and movies) in the world.  Always been like this ain't no cure for me.

Thing is the world that Holzner creates is a little atypical in today's UF/Paranormal genre.  Whereas you either have everyone trying to maintain the peace amongst normals and paranormals or everyone trying to hide the paranormals from normal folk, there's not a whole lot in between.  In steps Vicky Vaughn and Deadtown.  Three years ago a virus hit and had citizens turning into Zombies, not your George Romero Zombies (all brains, no flash), Zombies just the same.  Scared the beejeezus out of folks and thus was Deadtown born.  If you're not 100% human you have no rights, no civil liberties, no protection unless you're within the borders of Deadtown.  Actually that's not even a guarantee half the time.

For any history buffs out there I'm sure you can think of at least a half dozen examples of this happening in real life.  Its more or less human nature to be afraid of that which isn't the same so its not that big a surprise that when faced with those that really aren't human they corral and segregate with extreme prejudice.  Still the inhabitants of Deadtown seem to have gotten over it, mostly.  As long as no one brings the topic up.  Or hints at it. 

Vicky meanwhile finds herself walking a fine line, she's really only half inhuman, but her occupation makes it more or less more profitable to live on the inhuman side of things.  She's a demon-slayer, a fairly good one at that, getting ready for that one big fight.  Revenge motivates her, but she doesn't let it consume her, something I appreciated quite a bit with this new archetype character of "revenge only" on the mind running amok.  It doesn't hurt to give characters a hobby or two, it fleshes them out and gives them a fuller spectrum.

As this is the start of a planned series we get the prerequisite flux of characters who will all get their time to shine in some later book.  There's the boyfriend, Alexander Kane (workaholic werewolf), new buddy Daniel (human cop), Tina (teenage zombie apprentice) and...everyone else.  After a while I tried to really only zone in on the ones who seemed like they were the most important part of the book currently.  That's pretty much my modus operandi for most urban fantasies nowadays--its the only way to stay sane when the supporting cast can numbers into several dozen in just the first book.  While Tina was interesting, Alexander and Daniel didn't catch my attention.  The set up was pretty obvious, so it took some of the jazz out of the tension. 

Overall I enjoyed this novel quite a lot, enjoyed Vicky and her exploits, and look forward to the second novel, Hellforged.

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