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Sunday 27 April 2014

Review: KILL THE DEAD

Kill The Dead by Richard Kadrey
Book 2 of the Sandman Slim series
Genre: urban fantasy
Format: hardback

About Kill The Dead:
What do you do after you’ve crawled out of Hell to wreak bloody revenge? If you’re Stark you turn to bounty hunting, tracking and decimating whatever rogue monsters you’re paid to kill. Stark hates the work, but he needs the money, especially the big bucks Lucifer is offering. In town as an adviser on a biopic of his life, Lucifer needs protection, and he wants Stark as his bodyguard. But the gig isn’t all bad; there is the very sexy, very hot French porn star Brigitte Bardo, a friend of Lucifer’s in LA to remake her reputation as a legit actress. While it isn’t love, it’s pretty damn good, and after 11 years of demonic chastity, it’s enough for now.

Stark has enough trouble juggling a diva devil and a scorching French bombshell without a zombie plague to complicate matters. And just what happens when a human-angel half-breed is bitten by the living dead? His human side begins to die, transforming him into an unstoppable angel of death—a killing machine devoid of emotion or thought, with no regrets or future to worry about. Not a bad way to be when your choices are limited. Now, Stark has to decide . . . if he does finds a cure for the zombie infection, will he take it?
Source: Info in the About Kill The Dead was taken from GoodReads at http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7778609-kill-the-dead on 12/09/2013.

My Thoughts:
It hasn't really been properly explained in Book 1 who exactly gave Stark his nickname, Sandman Slim. And why. I was kinda hoping that an explaination would be presented here in Book 2, and I wasn't disappointed. Which made me a happy reader and brought the rating of this book up a notch. Now, let's talk cover arts. This is an urban fantasy book. Therefore targeting urban fantasy readers. So we are obviously dealing with a group of people who likes fantasy and fantastical elements. And this fantasies and fantastical elements is better appreciated by the senses if it is in technicolor. So I presume that the publishers would understand this. So why give an obviuosly urban fantasy book a dull cover such as this book has? The book cover being it's first line of marketing tool to sell the book has immediately failed right then and there! If you want to sell something to urban fantasy geeks, show them something fantastical! This series' cover arts would never ping my book buying radar, never mind reading it, if Kdawg91 hasn't doggedly recommended Kill City Blues to me!

Empirical Evaluation:
Story telling quality = 4
Character development = 4
Story itself = 4
Ending = 4
World building = 4.5
Cover art = 1
Pace = 4
Plot = 4

Overall Rating: 3.5 out of 5 cherries


Books In The Sandman Slim Series:

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