Red Hill

October 1, 2013
Far-fetched coincidences, encounters with reanimated cadavers and a smorgasbord of emotions, including--what else?--love, connect a group of people who flee a zombie apocalypse in McGuire's (Walking Disaster, 2013, etc.) novel. Someone should have paid closer attention to media reports from Europe about a viral outbreak and a scientist's experiments with the dead since, suddenly, hungry zombies are roaming Kansas, and even Toto's not safe. As people jump in their cars and try to escape the voracious biters, Scarlet, a hospital radiologist, desperately risks life and limb to reach her daughters, who are spending the weekend with her ex-husband in a neighboring town closely guarded by trigger-happy soldiers and crawling with the undead. Scarlet finds the house empty, and so she spray-paints a message on the walls so the girls will know where to go: Red Hill Ranch, a remote spread more than a 90-minute drive away. Blindly trusting that her ex-husband (who up until this point hasn't been the best father) will take care of the girls, Scarlet vamooses. After a brief stop in his brother-in-law's small town, Nathan, another parent, decides to seek a rural place to wait out the crisis with his young daughter, Zoe, who's prone to acting out at times but seems all too aware of what's going on around them. Meanwhile, two teenage sisters and their boyfriends pick up a soldier and speed toward their destiny in a very crowded VW bug. Dodging danger along the way, including close encounters with the living dead, Scarlet, Nathan and Miranda (one of the sisters) alternately relate the story from their own points of view and flesh out the main characters for readers. Until their lives converge, the story possesses adequate bite and horror to entertain the casual reader; however, almost immediately after the characters assemble at Red Hill, the simple escape-from-zombies-or-become-mincemeat premise slows to a shuffle. The plot disintegrates into monotonous repetition as characters brave losses, deal with an ominous guest, bash in more zombie heads, fall in love, grieve, fall in love again and wax philosophical about the future. By the time the novel lurches to the end, readers may find themselves pulling for the zombies.

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November 1, 2013
When a very ill young woman shows up in the ER after being bitten by a stranger, nurse Scarlet realizes the news reports she's been listening to about a mysterious epidemic taking hold in other parts of the world has struck close to home, and it's no ordinary virus. That's right, some scientist was finally smart enough to figure out how to make zombies but not smart enough to contain an outbreak. Nathan gets the news as he's picking his daughter up from elementary school, and he races home to find that his wife has selected a very bad day to run off. College student Miranda thinks the worst thing that can happen is missing out on her weekend plans, but her road trip is about to take a decidedly different turn. These three strangers end up on the run together, looking for a safe place to wait out the end of the world in this fast-paced apocalyptic tale. Contemporary romance novelist McGuire effortlessly switches genres with this novel, giving readers plenty of satisfying backstory and well-constructed characters. She even tosses in a love story.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)