Title: Fire & Ash Series: Rot & Ruin #4
Author: Jonathan Maberry
Published: August 13, 2013
Genre(s): Science Fiction
Page Count: 544
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Benny Imura and his friends have made it to Sanctuary, they've found the jet and they've discovered that civilization is struggling to regain its foothold in the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse. Scientists are on the verge of finding a cure for the zombie plague. It should be time for celebration, but it's not. Benny's best friend, Chong, has been infected by an arrow dipped in the flesh of a zombie and he hovers between life and death and Dr McReady, a researcher who may have the critical formula for a cure, has gone missing. So Benny convinces Captain Ledger to mount a search and rescue mission to find the doctor and help Chong. But with the Reapers still pursuing their plan to turn all zombies into super-fast shock troops even if they can save Chong, can they save themselves? In the fourth book of the thrilling and emotionally charged Rot & Ruin series, the battle to end all battles is about to begin...
I love when a series finale is satisfying rather than disappointing. In my experience, it doesn’t happen nearly often enough. I’ve had a somewhat rocky relationship with Jonathan Maberry’s Benny Imura series, and I was apprehensive about how Fire & Ash would play out. To my satisfaction, this book turned out to be one of the best in the quartet.
While the middle books in the series had a lot of walking and a plot that backtracked and went in circles, Fire & Ash was finally the straightforward action/thriller story that Maberry needed to bring everything together. Though the beginning was maybe a bit slow, things picked up, and before long Benny was fighting zombies and saving the world, just like we always knew he would.
One thing I did really appreciate about this book was that there was no shortage of strong women present. Out of Benny’s “team” of close friends, all of them are women, and none of them need to be babysat or fall prey to any trope that you might find in most male-narrated thrillers. Now, Maberry does get pretty blatant with the fact that he’s pushing the “Girl Power”—he goes so far as to say “girl power” in this book. But I like the fact that he consciously included well-rounded female characters in his book, rather than not having them altogether.
In terms of series wrap-up, Fire & Ash was pretty satisfactory. I would have liked a few more answers on how exactly the zombie plague started, because even though it was a totally predictable explanation, the book didn’t go into as the specifics I think that particular reveal warranted.
Like any Benny Imura book, there’s a lot of action and zombies and violence, though never so much that I would categorize this as an outright horror novel. Maberry masters just the right amount of gore, and balances it with downtime and exposition. YA isn’t exactly overrun with a plethora of zombie thrillers, so it’s nice to see how good this book was. Everything in Fire & Ash came together pretty well, and left me pleased with the series overall.
