The Down Home Zombie Blues (Linnea Sinclair)

The Down Home Zombie Blues
Linnea Sinclair
Linnea Sinclair, publisher
Fiction, Romance/Sci-Fi
** (Bad)

DESCRIPTION: Guardian agent Jorie has hunted more than her share of zombies - rogue artificial lifeforms that seek and destroy warm-blooded bodies - in her career. Tackling the herd recently discovered on a backwards dirtball of a planet should be no different... even if this herd is unusually large, theoretically too large for a single C-prime alpha to control. Get in, get out, and the xenophobic, planetbound "nil" locals will be none the wiser. At least, that was the plan - until she and her team arrive to discover their scout agent already dead, his residence swarming with local security officials.
Bahia Vista police sergeant Theo didn't know what to think when he saw the corpse: sucked dry, instant mummification, except for the eerily intact eyeballs staring out of its withered face. The tech discovered in the man's home didn't help, either, crawling with unintelligible symbols. But he has a job to do (even if he's technically supposed to be on Christmas vacation), and at least working will help keep his mind off picking the wounds left by his (now ex-)wife's betrayal. His partner Zeke still teases him about moping around the house playing blues guitar, but the happily-married man doesn't know what it's like to have his heart sucked dry like the body in front of them.
When Jorie encounters Theo, sparks fly - and monsters attack. Suddenly, a Florida cop finds himself in way over his head on a case - and a battle-scarred Guardian finds herself in way over her head with an off-limits nil man...

REVIEW: This should've been a decent book. Jorie should have been - and, occasionally, was - an independent, strong leading lady. But the story never misses a chance to undercut that independence and strength, subtly (and sometimes not-so-subtly) emphasizing the power and dominance of the exceptionally male-heavy cast. Even in the "enlightened" space society Sinclair constructs, women are apparently viewed mostly as potential bedmates by men, judging them by their lovers (or lack thereof) and playing territorial "dibs" games, even to the point of ignoring a woman's rank and authority. Jorie 's sole woman companion Guardian, rookie Tammy, even gets tortured to the point of catatonia (by a male enemy)... then shunted off to a friend of Theo's, who helps her by giving her a kitten to play with. This is progress? (Later, Theo even takes Jorie clothes shopping - not just for maintaining cover, but figuring that women enjoy clothes shopping and it'll help cheer her up. I wish I were kidding...) And it's not just the male aliens who dominate, here. Theo, a man who didn't even know aliens existed, let alone the monstrous zombies (I'll get back to them momentarily), before Jorie drops into his life, does his best to take over the planetside mission almost from the moment he becomes involved, and falls awfully fast for a man whose heart was ripped out of his chest by his shrewish, cheating ex... not the only stereotype in a book stuffed to the exophere with them, from the nosy Jewish neighbor lady to the overbearing Greek aunt constantly playing matchmaker. As for the blues angle... I don't even know why it was in the book, to be honest.
Now, on to the sci-fi portion of this romance/sci-fi split. There was, as I mentioned, potential here... but it was largely lost in a wash of technobabble and stilted alien narrative, particularly the overuse of certain words in a culture that apparently never developed a rich vocabulary. (If I ever read the word "bliss" - the phrase invariably used to denote any happiness or things going well - again, I might scream.) Once again, we have interstellar aliens who apparently have no comprehension of the concept of fiction or storytelling, and even though they conveniently speak a language that's almost English, their ability to comprehend basic colloquialisms is almost nil. The zombies themselves were genetically engineered entities whose original purpose had been corrupted... but why would one make such a deadly thing to begin with? There is no other possibility but for them to be killing machines. They're huge, they're equipped with massive extendable claws, and they're designed to seek out and suck fluids from any warm-blooded creature they detect - originally (in theory) to scan for potential infectious pathogens and contamination at hyperdrive gates (essentially), but really... did they need fifteen-foot-tall killing machines to do that when something smaller and less potentially lethal could've done the job? There's also the matter of the Tresh, the enemy aliens who once tortured Jorie over the course of years (creating yet another vulnerability that she needs men to help her through - silly woman, thinking she could be independent) and who are essentially vampires with their intolerance to bright like and genetically engineered "beauty" (a concept that varies significantly from culture to culture, let alone planet to planet, but which seems very Hollywoodized as described here), particularly the one male (of course) Tresh who tormented Jorie personally and - like half the rest of the cast - seems to have a personal thing... oh, but why go on?
The plot lurches in fits and starts, often bogging down to repeat stuff it's already told me or wade through more lakes of testosterone (and estrogen, as Jorie gets weak-kneed about Theo or debates her own poor luck with men or listens to Tammy tell her who she should or should not be with - because even girls define themselves by bedmates, apparently), often relying on out-of-the-blue occurrences to spur things forward or tangle things up as required. It ends eventually, as one would expect it to end, with every indication of sequels that apparently haven't appeared yet.
As I was reaching the end of this book, I took a break to watch an episode of the sci-fi show The Expanse. I found myself looking up at the screen and back to my Nook. Up at a screen filled to bursting with dynamic, truly independent women characters who were not defined solely by whom they chose to sleep with (and were not judged that way by others), and back to my Nook, where a highly-trained zombie hunter agent was squealing over a kitten while another moaned in "bliss" over the concept of peanut butter, even as the two men - human and alien - were almost to the point of whipping out and measuring over who could or could not have her. And when the episode was over and the credits rolled and it was time to pick up my Nook again and finish reading, I almost wept...

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