Book Review: The Fall by Caleb Cleek (Infected #1)

When a bus full of tourists, infected with a genetically engineered virus, stops in a quiet community for lunch, the area threatens to become the epicenter for a worldwide outbreak. Two Vista County deputies race to contain the revived dead, stop the spread, and combat the chaos and anarchy that ensues.

My Review:
Connor is a cop in Lost Hills, a rural town best known for being a rest and lunch stop for tourist buses that are passing through. On this day, a group of Japanese tourists enter the diner and start to collapse and die. Connor and the diner staff try to deal with the crisis which gets worse when the first body turns zombie and attacks. It becomes clear that a deadly virus has infected these tourists and attempts to quarantine the diner fails when it is discovered that someone from the bus went to another shop, and that an infected resident of the town who encountered her is trying to flee Lost Hills. Connor has to face a wait to see if he is immune and fears what may be happening to his family as zombies roam the town.

The opening chapters start off really well with the incidents in the diner and the realisation that everyone inside has been infected, causing a lockdown situation. On hearing details of the infection from medical experts, Connor starts to realise that he may be immune and can try to track the infected people from the other shop affected by the sick tourists. He has to try and balance his duty to protect the town and his fear for his family who came into contact with the woman fleeing town. This virus was a man-made Chinese bioweapon and a flight of Japanese tourists were targeted and infected with it before they arrived in the US. Just breathing the air expelled from an infected person is enough to infect and being bitten by zombies is of course also fatal unless you are immune. The infection was interesting to read about.

Trouble is about to descend on the town in the form of Homeland Security teams who have instructions to kill everyone who came into contact with the tourists, regardless of whether they are immune or not. With Connor stuck in town looking at their handiwork, he realises that a team is headed out to his home to kill him and his family. Can he and Matt get out there in time? This was a very good section of the book. I certainly can't complain about the amount of action in the book and the way it is written, though the dumb decisions of the characters do leave a little to be desired!

My bug bear is that Connor is happy to play hero and run around town saving everyone but never seems to pay any attention to the safety of his family back at their house. After going to the trouble of ensuring they are safe in the rural house, he leaves to go into town and has to rush back when he realises that Homeland Security are attacking the house. After that you'd think he would take a bit more care but nope, every time he leaves the house or loses focus, some disaster seems to befall his family whether it is zombies or bad guys. You can't expect two women-one untrained with a gun and one recovering from being shot, and an old retired man who can barely walk and two kids to look after things each time you leave them unprotected! Likewise he seems to find trouble in every place he goes to in town, which doesn't help.

The soldiers left in town seem to have no real purpose in just stopping people travelling down one road, instead of getting out there and killing zombies and bad guys. I also wonder at their common sense in not having their vehicles in a defensive position to protect their front and rear if attacked. They give Connor a few vaccinations that protect people from the virus. Why did he not give these to Frank and his brother, who he deemed so vital in the protection of the town, instead giving them to his best friend's wife and kid? Funny how Connor has enough sense of duty to abandon his family for town issues yet wastes the vaccination on people hiding at his house instead of giving it to the best gunfighters in the town. Yes that makes sense. He also doesn't seem to think out a plan before racing off every time. THINK what the bad guys might do and target before you run off to do other things!

Another niggle is that it can get too descriptive about things that really don't matter. We don't need to know every single detail of how an injection is given. We all know how it is done so it was unnecessary. These detailed info dumps do tend to appear suddenly and affect the flow of the story, which is a shame when the actual story has enough interest of its own. Overall though it was a pretty solid and fast paced zombie pandemic story and it did keep me reading to the end. I'm not reading on with book two though, as the first two books were released in 2014 and 2015 and there has been no sign of any other books to finish the story. I really do hate unfinished series and I won't buy book two unless book three (if it is the last book) comes out.

Read January 2020
3 stars.