OUTBACK OUTBREAK by Frank Tayell

 4 out of 5 stars

On Amazon (universal link)
On Goodreads

How I discovered this book: I've read a lot of books by this author, so Amazon recommends others!

In a Nutshell: Beginning of zombie apocalypse, in Australian Outback.  

Frank Tayell has written extensively about the same zombie apocalypse, a main series (Suviving The Evacuation) that started about ten years ago and is up to Book 21, and the other related collections, set in different places.  Kind of like The Walking Dead with all its spin-offs!

This first book of the Surviving The Evacuation: Life Goes On series is set in Australia, in which a carpet salesman from Indiana called Pete Guinn goes on a mission to find his oddly elusive sister, where she works mending fences in the Outback.  The events of the first chapters were labelled as '18 hours before the outbreak', etc - the suspense building even though Pete didn't know it!  As well as breakdown of civilisation and the zombies, rich evil cartel type people provide Pete, Corrie and their friends yet more headaches.

I very much liked going back to the beginning of the apocalypse (I've only read up to about Book 8 of the original series), and enjoyed Pete's shock at the reality of trying to exist in the Outback, even before the zombies appear.  It's a good story and I did like it, but my interest waned with the original because the characters' conversations became too information-dump-ish, as though the dialogue is being used primarily as a vehicle for giving information to the reader, rather than as an expression of character, and I felt the same creeping in here.  This can result in the characters coming across a bit one-dimensional, or all speaking in the same 'voice'.  This wasn't the case in the earlier books (my review of Book 1, written 9 years ago, HERE).

Anyway, I still liked it!  Mr Tayell is a fine judge of pace, creator of plot, builder of suspense, etc - and, in case you ever read this, Frank, I laughed at this: He didn't know much about hotels, motels or any variation in between, but he knew carpet and the one beneath his feet was expensive.  A hard-wearing, two-ply, eighty per cent wool mix with a polyester coating to ease cleaning.  I used to know a chap who sold carpets, and he was not dissimilar.  We'd be watching telly and he'd point at the screen during a really dramatic scene, and say, "That's a nice bit of Worsted fibre bonded.  Made by Danflor, if I'm not mistaken'.