That welt on your arm really itches. Must’ve been a mosquito that bit you, or maybe a fly or another bug of some sort. Doesn’t matter, it’ll stop itching by morning but in the meantime, you scratch, scratch, scratch. If you were a character in the new book “One Yellow Eye” by Leigh Radford, though, you might never be the same again.
The Zombie Apocalypse Recovery Group was largely a waste of time.
Still, Kesta Shelley attended anyhow, because it was expected of her. She was a pathologist, for one, and she was supposed to have had a handle on the outbreak and how it happened. And two, she was a widow, or at least that was the story.
Truth was, she and Tim were out one night, though they knew better. She’d recognized a child zombie for what it was and she’d warned him but the zombie was faster than Tim and he was bitten. Kesta got him home before he’d fully turned into a zombie, too, and she restrained him before he could bite her. Now her husband lay in their apartment with one yellow eye open but she couldn’t confide in anyone that he was not dead, not entirely. She had to live a lie; officials in London thought all zombies had been dispatched.
She felt certain that Tim knew who she was, although he could only grunt and snarl at her. She gently tended to his paper-thin skin, gave him transfusions of her own blood, stole care supplies from the hospital where she worked. She loved him, he was her husband.
Now Kesta only had to find a cure. Finally accepted at Project Dawn, a program meant to find a vaccine, she was tasked with hours of peering into a microscope, looking for the undefinable, trying to avoid the project’s secretive director, looking for something that would help Tim. Hoping.
But there was one problem: You could never fully trust a zombie.
It might bite. Start “One Yellow Eye” and you might feel like closing both of yours. The beginning of this novel — indeed, the first dozen pages or so — plod along like a B-movie zombie might.
And yet, there’s reason to endure that hump and get beyond it: The story has a twist that zombie novel lovers don’t generally see: author Leigh Radford’s tale isn’t all apocalyptic or grunting or bloody, eating-guts gruesome. Yes, that’s there and it’s enough to satisfy fans of this genre, but also watch for some heart-pounding moments, well-landed chuckles that pop up like bubbles in this story, and a surprising romance tucked among authentic science, all of which are impressive because they work. You will want, need, to get past the limping introduction, and you’ll be happily hooked by the sharpness and the tenderness of the tale.
Zombie lovers will eat this book up, but it’s also a feast for science-minded fiction fans and romance readers, too. If you crave a good apocalyptic novel for this summer, “One Yellow Eye” nicely scratches that itch.
— The Bookworm Sez
