Pandemic

The alien intelligence that unleashed two horrific assaults on humanity has been destroyed. But before it was brought down in flames, it launched one last payload-a tiny soda-can-sized canister filled with germs engineered to wreak new forms of havoc on the human race. That harmless-looking canister has languished under thousands of feet of water for years, undisturbed and impotent...until now.

Days after the new disease is unleashed, a quarter of the human race is infected. Entire countries have fallen. And our planet's fate now rests on a small group of unlikely heroes, racing to find a cure before the enemies surrounding them can close in.

I received this book for free from in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Review by Travis Starnes

An alien intelligence launches one last shot at the human race causing a new disease to take hold and bring humanity to the brink of extinction.  Pandemic is the third book, and apparently the last book, in the Infected series.  The series revolves around an alien intelligence attempts to destroy humanity, and humanity’s response.

While this book is clearly a sequel and assumes previous knowledge of events earlier in the series it drops enough breadcrumbs to keep up with what is going on.  This is good because I had never read any parts of the infected series and had no idea what was going on.  While I was lost for a chapter getting my bearings the book moves at a rapid enough pace that it doesn’t take long to catch hold.

And that pacing is probably the best thing about this book.  It moves very fast and doesn’t give the reader a lot of time to think or adjust.  To be clear I think that is a very good thing.  Pandemic is never boring and will keep you flipping pages to find out what happens.  Sigler does an excellent job moving the story along while maintaining suspense, not always the easiest of balancing acts.  The last act in particular is pretty amazing and worth the price of admission alone.

The characters in this book are pretty well done, although I am sure a lot of the events that happen would have had a bigger impact had I read the previous books in the series and had a deeper investment in them.  Still the author did a good job giving enough background on characters for new readers that I could figure it out and see where the characters were going.

The action in this book is what really does it.  This book really flirts with the edge of the apocalypse/post-apocalyptic and has a really interesting take on, I am going to say zombies but that isn’t really what they are, that I haven’t seen before.  I really liked the way Sigler introduced different types of creatures and used them, and how they retained enough of their humanity to seem really creepy.

This is a really fun book to read, packed with action, aliens, zombies (kinda) and completely worth reading.  Although you should consider reading the first two books first.