ORDER A COPY: Death Warmed Over (Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I.)
Publisher: Kensington Publishing
Publishing Date: August 28, 2012
Paperback: 305 pages
Rating: DNF
Ever since The Big Uneasy unleashed vampires, werewolves, and other undead denizens on the world, it’s been hell being a detective—especially for zombie P.I. Dan Chambeaux. Taking on the creepiest of cases in the Unnatural Quarter with a human lawyer for a partner and a ghost for a girlfriend, Chambeaux redefines “dead on arrival.” But just because he was murdered doesn’t mean he’d leave his clients in the lurch. Besides, zombies are so good at lurching.
Now he’s back from the dead and back in business—with a case load that’s downright unnatural. A resurrected mummy is suing the museum that put him on display. Two witches, victims of a curse gone terribly wrong, seek restitution from a publisher for not using “spell check” on its magical tomes. And he’s got to figure out a very personal question—Who killed him?
For Dan Chambeaux, it’s all in a day’s work. (Still, does ***everybody*** [delete: the media] have to call him “Shamble”?) Funny, fresh, and irresistible, this cadaverous caper puts the P.I. in R.I.P….with a vengeance.
This was a cleverly written book by Kevin Anderson. I was intrigued by the novelty of the zombie P.I. but the story didn’t hold my attention.
Although I didn’t finish this book, I did spend a lot of time laughing at the parts of the book that I did read, but the underlying story of Dan’s murder and the murder of his girlfriend was so chopped up among the other stories, that I lost my overall interest in the book. We were introduced to characters whose cases he was investigating, but then we didn’t go back to them before meeting other characters or focusing on Dan’s case for a while. The main character indicates that this is the way of investigations, not the one hr solution of the case you see on TV, but it ended up being as choppy as a multi-POV story. Maybe it was simply that it was trying to do too much.
As far as being cleverly written, for example, there was the nerdy vampire who thought all his neighbors were being staked since they weren’t showing up for his book club or his chess club, etc. No question they were not intending to spend eternity with this dweeb.
There was also the witch sisters who bought a new spell book and wanted to use a beauty spell, but due to a typo in the spell, the one sister was turned into a pig. The book company was standing behind their statement of “the book was intended for entertainment purposes only.”
There were great lines that included the new seasonings to make chicken “taste just like human.”
And talk of the local beat cop, “When he walked his beat, McGoo tried to be prepared for everything. He carried a service revolver loaded with regular bullets on his left hip, and one with silver-jacketed bullets on the right. He had a spray can of Mace and a spray can of holy water, along with a bandolier with wooden stakes, both blunted and sharpened.”
I don’t know if it would be been better written as a collection of short stories focusing on a particular case investigation until the end, or maybe that is how it started and Kevin Anderson tried to revise it to add the continuing story of Shamble’s own murder investigation the flow the whole thing together.
In the end, I put this book aside to start on something else that I had really wanted to read, but it didn’t have enough draw that I bothered to pick it up again.
It was very cleverly written and certainly enough to make you chuckle, but I don’t know how the novelty won’t run out real fast.
