Dick Goes to the Bank - By Avery Dick/George Larson

Avery Dick is a retired special agent who specializes in getting the bad guy and speaking in puns. He smokes, drinks and attempts to womanize... he speaks in bad puns and thinks in repetitive sentences. However he has a job to do, he has been enlisted by the World Bank to head off to Romania - land of vampires and witches - to determine the cause of a sudden epidemic that is killing the locals. Why does the World Bank care about a few Romanian peasants? Because they recently sent them a gift of grain and seed - and the superstitious peasants are blaming the bank for the sudden plague.

What starts out as fairly straight forward ends up a rather dangerous mission for Mr. Dick. Though he never seems overly concerned with his safety, and some of his decision making leaves a little to be desired. This is a short book, only 150 or so pages and can be read in a single sitting. On the whole it is well written, but it is written for a specific type of audience, though it is not laugh out loud funny, I imagine fans of "Ace Ventura" or "The Jerk" would enjoy this book. Not that the book is meant to be silly, it is sort of short attention span - light hearted with a dash of heroics thrown in for good measure. We don't spend a lot of time on description or intense action, the book is first person with Mr. Dick's mind speaking directly to the reader. If bad puns make you groan, steer clear... if you hate repetition - this in not the book for you, as the author ends each of the short chapters with a variation of the same line.

Final summary - read before giving this to the kiddies, as there is murder, profanity and some sexual innuendo. Those looking for a fast, straightforward read that won't take too much out of them or require a whole lot of effort - this is a great relaxing book to pick up. Only a few minor typos and a simple, but clean layout make this a fairly attractive book.

Eden by Tony Monchinski

If you are looking for a down and dirty Zombie novel, then look no farther. Provided of course that you can wade your way through multiple typos. The author has created almost the stereotypical archetype of a zombie book. Masses of undead, survivors banding together, total government breakdown, slow zombies, fast zombies, loud zombies, good survivors and bad survivors - it's all here.

The timeline leaps back and forth starting from within the walls of Eden, a sanctuary from the undead back to prior to the outbreak, then through various scenes of the pandemonium that followed. Some may dislike this format, I personally didn't mind it. The characters are very real, human, and flawed. Some are tortured by the loss of loved ones, others must deal with what they had to do to survive. The zombies in this book are what many zombie lovers would consider "old school" mindless shambling hoards of the undead.

What is interesting is that even though there isn't a single aspect of this novel that has not been done or seen before, this book reads as an all new story. I would consider this a must have for your zombie library. When I previously referred to typos, and there are plenty of them they mainly involve a lack of spaces between words at times, and at other times the leaving off of the last letter of a word, example the word "took" turning into "too." If you don't mind that then I highly recommend this book to the 15+ zombie fans.

Rated R for gore, violence, language both profane and racist, no sex is shown but it is very strongly eluded to.