Something Strange and Deadly (Something Strange and Deadly - Trilogy) [Hardcover]

Something Strange and Deadly is exactly my kind of book. It is a little bit different, a little bit funny and a little bit bizarre which is exactly what I like in my fiction. I also loved how this book combined 18th century America with zombies. What this book offers is a good story, great characters and some lovely writing. It is a cross between The Evil Dead and Downton Abbey...just with more cute boys and corsets.

All in all I found this book to be gripping and exciting, there is a lot of action and at times it was also quite spooky. It had its touching moments, funny moments and an ending that leaves you satisfied but also impatient for more.

One of the great things about this book is the characters. Elenor is a great. She is stubborn, smart and brave. She won't let people walk all over her and I ended up liking her quite a lot. Daniel was also great. He is introduced in a peculiar way and it was impossible not to like him instantly. He is cute but that is not why you like him, he has bundles of personality which makes him easy to adore.

The romance was a sweet one but there wasn't much of it, that wasn't a problem because instead of insta-love there was a build-up which made everything feel more real and more intense. There is a lot of humorous banter between the two characters and you can feel the connection and attraction between them building and building.

I loved the way this book was written all the characters were well developed; all the world building made everything easy to envision and the language used was spot on for the period.

I would love to give this book five stars but there is one thing holding me back. I found it a little predictable, not the plot or the characters; I didn't know what was coming next. But I knew the `who did it' reveals long before they happened. I have a habit of doing this all the time so I don't know if it is the book or me.

Apart from that I was really impressed with this book, it is one of my books of the year so far and a great start to what I hope will be a great series. I highly recommend it.

(Source: I was given a digital copy of this book for free on a read-to-review basis. Thanks to Harper Collins Publishers and Edelweiss.)
16-year-old Eleanor Fitt lives in Philadelphia, in an alternate 1876, in which occasionally the dead become reanimated, and climb from their coffins, hungry for flesh! Coffins are even fitted with bells to alert people to the dead rising!

Things have gotten particularly bad recently though, with not just the occasional corpse rising, but many corpses at a time. It is thought that this is due to a necromancer, and a team of `Spirit Hunters' have arrived in Philadelphia to try and solve the problem.

Eleanor Fitt would normally have no interest in this sort of thing, but when a corpse delivers a letter to her from her brother who should have arrived home already, she's worried that Elijah has been attacked, or dead, or worse - one of the walking dead!

Eleanor finds out where to find the spirit hunters and goes to them for help. But where is Elijah? What has happened to him? And can the spirit hunters stop the rising dead when a whole cemetery is bought back to life?!

I enjoyed this book, although it didn't quite live up to my expectations. I think the biggest problem for me was that while at times I wanted to keep reading, and at other times the story just didn't hold my attention and I found myself constantly putting it down and picking it back up. It actually took me days to finish this, which is unusual.

Eleanor was an interesting character, although bended to her mother's will too much. She obviously cared about her brother, but while initially she worried that he was one of the walking dead, she then said that she thought she would know if Elijah was dead.
Daniel was also an interesting character, but I felt like we didn't really get enough of him to really set him up as a love interest.

The zombies were referred to as `the walking dead', I'm not really sure what the definition of a zombie is, but these were corpses that were reanimated by a necromancer, and only became hungry and attacked when ordered by the necromancer, or when they slipped from his control. They didn't seem scary the way I would expect a book about zombies to be.

I liked the fact that the book was set in 1876, it kind of gave me a similar feel to the `Luxe' series, but still with the supernatural touch of the zombies!

I liked the way the book ended, but there was a final twist at the end which totally shocked me! I am also looking forward to finding out what happens in the next book in this series!
6.5 out of 10.

I'm going to start this review with a disclaimer. From the synopsis of this book I had a very different expectation than was the reality. This is not really a book about zombies at all, but more of a steampunk mystery that includes spirit-hunters and necromancers.

Because of that expectation, I didn't really start to enjoy this book until somewhere around the 200 page mark - I found the first half, although it starts with an actioned-packed scene, wasn't really going anywhere. The main character, Eleanor, spent a lot of time investigating and trying to find out where her brother was, whilst trying to avoid the slightly (ok, more than slightly) annoying Clarence.

Eleanor herself was a good main character with a balance of bravery and smart-arsedness, but not of the arrogant kind - more of a slightly rebellious teenager who still wants to do the right and proper thing as much as possible and as the book progressed I liked her more and more. I enjoyed the blossoming romance between Eleanor and Daniel, and he was probably my favorite character of the whole book.

The writing is fairly straightforward, if a little heavy on the exclamation points, and the formality of the dialogue was realistic to the timeframe, if some of the relationships (such as that between Clarence and Eleanor) progressed much faster than would have been normal, or socially acceptable in the 1870s.

In the end, I did enjoy Something Strange and Deadly, and probably would have enjoyed it more if I hadn't started out with different expectations. If you enjoy reading historical mysteries with a bit of steampunk and romance thrown in for good measure, I'm sure you would enjoy this one.