3.5 I was really excited to dive into this one, hoping for something unique, fun, and punchy like The Last One At The Party. While it offered some fresh explanation and lore about zombies, it was much slower and more sad than I was expecting based on the blurb and cover, which suggests some degree of humour and fiasco.

It’s gonna be tricky to talk about this in detail without spoilers. All possible spoilers have been removed here but are hidden in spoiler tags in my links.

What worked for me:
🧟‍♀️ I liked that the author didn’t (re)use COVID-19 pandemic language: this is something I notice a lot in fiction (I am not someone who enjoys reading about the recent pandemic in fiction) and appreciated the use of alternative/different language (curfew, infected, etc.)
🧟‍♀️ The sense of claustrophobia between the apartment and the lab was well done.
🧟‍♀️ I really liked the fresh take on the virus origin! It felt new while also being plausible.
🧟‍♀️ I appreciated that the infected had physical limitations (too often they’re portrayed as super fast, indestructible, with super human strength which doesn’t seem realistic).
🧟‍♀️ While her characterization wasn’t as strong as I’d hoped, I noticed Kesta’s development arc.

What I wasn’t so keen on:
🧟‍♀️ The characters never really got out of second gear for me. I get that Kesta loved Tim but all we see is her desperate attachment. We don’t really explore their history, connection, or what their 19 year marriage was like (until this was revealed, I thought they’d been together for mere months? We jump from an incomplete how-they-met interlude to glossing over basically the entire pre-infection relationship). I also didn’t understand her actions: we kept hearing about how devoted she was to Tim but she was constantly risking his safety and getting caught by going out for meals, keeping irregular hours, being drunk all the time. 
Similarly, I didn’t feel a strong connection between Jess and Kesta. Jess annoyed me as a character: she was vacuous, needy, and didn’t understand boundaries. The characters that did show complexity: Cooke, Dudley, and the lab manger, were firmly relegated to ‘side characters’ and every single one of their relationships to the main character was trope-y and predictable.
🧟‍♀️ Despite Kesta’s best efforts, she has incredible luck and timing. I felt that a lot of the stupid situations she got herself into were only resolved with sheer dumb luck or parking established characterization when it was convenient for plot purposes.
🧟‍♀️ I didn’t like reading about the animal testing.

About the ending…
There's no good way to end a book like this where a binary yes/no is basically the only way forward. <spoilers removed>

There were a lot of outstanding questions that distracted me throughout the book and after I'd finished. <spoilers removed>

This book had a great plot with intriguing characters. I’ll definitely be looking out for more from this author.