The final part of the Newsflesh trilogy is a fitting end, even if it didn’t quite hit the exciting heights of the series opener. It’s going to be really hard to review this one without dropping a couple of major spoilers for this and the previous books, so if you haven’t already read them, click away now…
SPOILERS BELOW…
We rejoin the surviving members of our team with them in hiding with the doc, catching her live zombies for her to experiment with and exposing Sean to the virus as much as possible to test the limits of his newly discovered immunity. His dead sister is still residing in his head, the state of Florida has been decimated by the recently engineered virus-carrying mosquitos and Alaric’s little sister (and only surviving family member) is trapped there, necessitating a rescue plan. Meanwhile, in a secret CDC installation, newly cloned Georgia Mason has just woken up, intended to be used as a tool against Sean but with plans of her own.
I find Georgia a more enjoyable narrator than Sean, so I found her return a welcome one even if I found the information dumps that were required to explain her existence a little less welcome. Also not particularly welcome was the turn that Georgia and Sean’s relationship took once reunited, revealing that their closeness was down to rather a lot more than their sibling relationship (I have adopted family members and regardless of the lack of shared genetics, they’re absolutely family, so I was rather squicked out by the rest of their interactions no matter how many times they tried to hammer home that they don’t share DNA).
Considering how long we’ve spent with the Masons and their crew as they try to uncover the conspiracy of weaponised Kellis-Amberlee, the resolution did feel like it all happened rather quickly – although we did at least get another thrilling battle and an affecting sacrifice before the end to make up for it.
This all sounds like I probably enjoyed the book a little less than I actually did, as Blackout is again a decent read and I’ll definitely continue to read as much Mira Grant/Seanan McGuire as I can get my hands on. It just never quite got back to being as quite as good as Feed was.