This is the best of the series so far, but it's not without its (gaping) flaws. Annah is for me the most relatable of the three protagonists of the books, and as much as her struggle is - like everyone's - the zombies, she's also limited by her own refusal to really engage with other people. That's not something that Mary or Gabry ever had to deal with, but it's the most realistic response, I think, for a person in the midst of zombie apocalypse. When everyone you get attached to leaves - often in hideous and gory ways - well, most people would pull back into themselves somewhat. It's the rational response, and Ryan doesn't shy away from how very badly Annah has been affected.

Better than this, though, are all the truly horrifying images of the story. Ryan's always been very good, in this series, at painting pictures that are genuinely creepy. The zombies waking up under ice, the infestation and slow chase through subway tunnels, the mass of zombies slowly breaking down every barrier between themselves and human warmth... they're all fantastic. A+ for the creepy images!

What's keeping this book from being a 4 star read are the antagonists. Not the zombies, but the Recruiters, who ostensibly exist to protect the city and, when that city falls, retreat to an all-male enclave that falls into every pathetic and irritating post-apocalyptic trope out there: violent, sexually aggressive, woman-hating arseholes. They like torture, they take pleasure in suffering. And they think they can survive that way. Annah points out, towards the end, that all their attempts to ensure that future generations survive will fail because there aren't any women with them on their fortress island, which, I distinctly remember female Recruits in previous books, but they've just disappeared from the narrative in favour of this bullshit. Ox (you can tell his intelligence from his name), the man who's running the Recruiters, says there are some Souler women available, but he and his men have been feeding them to zombies for fun, when they're not indiscriminately shooting any of the very few survivors that come near. The utter stupidity of this storyline is too much to take. It's just lazy, lazy world-building, for the sake of resurrecting the most tired trope in all of post-apocalypse. I complain a lot about the "we must rebuild the world! (therefore it's clearly acceptable to rape to do it)" narrative that pops up so often in post-apocalyptic dystopias, but never have I seen one where the men don't even appear to grasp that they're not parthenogenic.

I mean, I know that zombies are supposed to eat people's brains, and that must have been the case here, because the biggest dark and hollow place of this book resides firmly inside the empty, eaten-out skulls of the bad guys.