Blackout (Mira Grant)

Blackout
The Newsflesh series, Book 3
Mira Grant
Orbit
Fiction, Horror/Sci-Fi
***** (Great)

DESCRIPTION: The blogger journalists of After the End Times have sacrificed everything, including lives, in their relentless pursuit of truths across a zombie-riddled post-Rising America. What they have found is a conspiracy reaching to the highest echelons of the Center for Disease Control, who embody the concept of absolute power having corrupted absolutely in their zealous efforts to control the plague. Shaun Mason barely clings to his sanity, not sure if his ongoing hallucinations of his deceased adopted sister Georgia are helping him or hurting him, dedicating himself to bringing the people responsible for her death to justice before ending his own misery... but there are still more dark secrets and surprises in store, as he and his core crew of journalists are about to discover. This story will be the biggest in their career, the one that might quite literally change the world - if any of them survive long enough to tell it.
Meanwhile, in a top secret lab, a young woman awakens in a white room: a girl with the face and the memories of Georgia Mason, grown with illicit techniques in a CDC facility. She may be the key to Shaun's survival and his mission's success, or the final blow to his already-fractured sanity who destroys everything he and the real Georgia worked for.

REVIEW: The third book of the original Newsflesh trilogy (which has since expanded by at least one companion volume and collected short stories) continues the fast pacing and high stakes and grim emotional and physical toll (not to mention the body count) of the previous installments, set in a world with eerie prescient echoes of our current pandemic situation (only COVID has thus far failed to raise the dead, and the CDC is more trustworthy than not). Shaun's mind continues to fracture, producing full-body tactile hallucinations of the late Georgia, the only person he ever trusted or truly loved; even as he recognizes his own deterioration, he digs in all the harder to honor her memory, even if - especially if - it costs his own life. The friends and colleagues around him do what they can to help, but can only watch as he entrenches himself further in his death mission and self-recognized delusions. Meanwhile, the cloned Georgia has retained more of her original memories and personality than her makers might have anticipated, too loyal to the truth and to Shaun to be the showpiece or tool they intend her to be. Still, she knows that she is not the person she remembers herself to be, for all that she can't seem to be anyone or anything else. The conspiracy of power they've pitted themselves against continues wantonly tossing lives away by the thousands, even hundreds of thousands; after the disastrous spread of the virus-transmitting engineered mosquitos turns the whole of Florida into a zombie wasteland, they aren't about to stop now, not when they're so close to obtaining the future they've deemed fit for the world. It's a harrowing race, with twists and turns and betrayals aplenty, leading to an appropriately powerful climax. As I'm not generally a fan of zombies, I was all the more amazed to find myself enjoying it so much.

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