More Reviews, Sorry to be lax in posting

Cain’s Blood
Geoffrey Girard
Touchstone, $25.99
ISBN 9781476704043

In Pennsylvania, six young subjects escape from the Dynamic Solutions Technology Institute, but not before they massacred most of the staff and took a few as prisoners. Also missing is Dr. Gregory Jacobsen who led the cloning experiment and probably abetted the escape by the six clones of notorious serial killers.

Special Ops veteran Shawn Castillo leads the search for the murderous clones starting at the DSTI facility and then Dr. Jacobson’s home. He quickly learns that the scientists created more subjects than they reported with some adopted by unaware caring families. Jacobsen kept one child with him, Jeffrey who recently learned that his true sire is Dahmer. With Jeffrey as his sidekick, Castillo hunts the killers.

This is a taut DNA thriller filled with insight and asides into cloning that enhance the horror of what Jacobson and others have wrought though the lead geneticist is no regretting “Modern Prometheus” (Mary Shelley). Once again as with the YA companion piece Project Cain, the underlying premise that the military would consider using serial killers seems wrong; as besides being loners psychologically unfit for a cohesive unit, consider the PR from news media telling grieving moms that their child died from a Dahmer clone in a friendly fire incident. Still this is an action-packed suspense that makes a strong cautionary case when it comes to cloning humans. Harriet Klausner

White Trash Zombie Apocalypse
Diana Rowland
DAW, $7.99
ISBN 9780756408039

In Tucker Pont, Louisiana, Angel Crawford drives the St. Edward’s Parish coroner’s van for a living though she is dead. She notices zombies smoking cigarettes and realizes like her no living zombie would be caught dead smoking or drinking as brain matter is not easy to replace; ergo these idiots are wannabes.

Her latest corpse retrieval is at the prime location of the filming of High School Zombie Apocalypse. Brent Stewart was walking when a pole broke and fell on his head at Tucker Pont High School. As she bags the body, she notices Philip, who she was forced to change as part of a military experiment to create a super zombie soldier, but she had not seen him in months. He rescues her from a car seemingly deliberately trying to run her over; her “baby” flees immediate from the near fatal incident. Angel investigates who wants her dead with all answers leading to her boyfriend and “sire” Marcus Ivanov’s powerful Uncle Pietro.

The latest Angel Crawford Louisiana white trash zombie (see My Life As A White Trash Zombie and Even White Trash Zombies Get the Blues) is an amusing bayou investigative fantasy. Readers will continue to root for the heroine who ironically lives a morally productive lifestyle as a dead head than she did when she was alive; while her past as an impoverished druggie neglected by her mom and living with a drunken dad still haunts her. Fans will enjoy this fun metafiction with a zombie movie filmed in the midst of zombie parish. Harriet Klausner

Claimed by the Immortal
Rachel Lee
Harlequin Nocturne, $5.75
ISBN: 9780373885763

Police Captain Malloy informs Police Sergeant Carolyn Hamilton that he placed her on indefinite medical leave because of her insistence that she saw Andrew Pritchett lifted six feet in the air by nothing visible and tossed across the room on to a stuffed elk’s horn. None of the other cops on the scene saw any of this nor can anyone explain what happened to the battered murdered family of five. Her mentor Detective Matthews tells her to take the leave, come back in a week or so, never mention the impossible here, but visit Messenger Investigations to tell what she witnessed to Jude Messenger who handles the eerie that the cops claim do not exist.

With some limited psychic ability like reading auras, Carolyn senses someone watches her; a feeling she has had since she saw the unreal happen. She meets Jude and his associate Damien Keller; noticing each shares the same golden eyes and odd auras like none she ever saw before. To her amazement, they believe her story. Attracted to the mortal witch and amused by her being unaware of what she is, Damien the German vampire vows to keep Carolyn safe from what is watching her.

The latest Claiming urban romantic fantasy (see Claim the Night for Jude’s tale) is an action-packed investigative thriller that never decelerates from the moment that Carolyn arrives at the weird Messenger Investigations office and never misses a beat until the final confrontation. Readers will appreciate the vampire and the witch falling in love while hunting an invisible stalker amidst numerous viable suspects. Harriet Klausner