Rise Again

September 20, 2010
Zombie mayhem gets an interesting modern American makeover in this notable debut. In Forest Peak, a quiet town an hour outside of Los Angeles, the crowds at an Independence Day gathering suddenly go crazy, drop dead, and rise as flesh-eating corpses. As the zombies ravage the town, sheriff Danielle "Danny" Adelman, a veteran of the Iraq War, gathers together the few human survivors and they head north, looking for refuge. In San Francisco, Danny discovers signs of a military coverup for the disaster and indications that Hawkstone, a team of paramilitary independent contractors, is taking advantage of the social anarchy. Tripp balances kinetically choreographed scenes of zombie carnage with studies of well-drawn characters and enough political intrigue to give his tale more gravity and grounding than most zombie gorefests.

Starred review from October 15, 2010

When the novel opens, a small-town teen named Kelley has run away from home, leaving her older sister alone the day before the zombies appear. The sister, Danny, is the town sheriff and an Iraq war vet with post-traumatic stress syndrome. Danny's journey through a land of death to find Kelley makes for a remarkable character-driven story, and the final sentence takes it to another level. Unquestionably, it packs the best ending in this batch of books. BZG By the end, Danny is leading a Road Warrior-style convoy, roaming the West in search of peace.

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2010
Danny is a mentally and physically scarred Iraq War vet who returned to her small hometown in the San Bernadino Mountains and is now sheriffjust in time for screaming mobs to descend on her town carrying a zombie plague. Gathering up the few survivors (the ones who were neither turned to zombies nor eaten by the newly undead), Danny leads them to safety on an old Air Force base in the desert. But her leadership role among the survivors must be put on hold until she learns what happened to her little sister, Kelly, who ran away from home the night before the zombie plague arrived. Traveling in her vintage Mustang, Danny traverses a post-apocalyptic California, arriving finally in a besieged San Francisco, which is controlled by a ruthless group of military contractors. Tripps debut is a thrilling page-turner that will delight fans of zombie fiction and post-apocalyptic stories, including Charlie Hustons Sleepless (2010) and Justin Cronins The Passage (2010).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)