Theo Petrakos is a Florida homicide detective. But the veteran cop has never seen anything like the body of Dan J. Wayne. The corpse is so severely mummified that it seems ancient. Yet the eyes are moist. And the dead man's computer has no keyboard or off button, and its bizarre text is inscrutable.

Theo Petrakos finds the answers to these mysteries when he's attacked by a huge monster with three pulsing red eyes and four ferociously clawed limbs. He kills it with the aid of a mysterious, exotic-looking, beautiful woman dripping with unknown weapons and technology. He learns the monster is a misprogrammed alien bioconstruct known as a zombie—one of the things that killed Dan J. Wayne, better known to his extraterrestrial colleagues as Danjay Wain. Theo also finds himself transported with the mysterious woman, Commander Jorie Mikkalah, to her starship. And Theo learns that "nils"—the inhabitants of nil-tech worlds—are forbidden to know about zombies or the people who hunt and kill them. So he will be sent to another world.

Though intrigued by Jorie, Theo has no interest in leaving Earth forever. However, he quickly learns that exile on a distant planet might be preferable to the fate he finds himself facing with Commander Mikkalah. While they're back on Earth, her starship disappears, destroyed by her people's implacable enemy, the Tresh. Another starship might be along to rescue them someday, but long before then they'll be dead, along with the people of Earth. For the zombies are showing unprecedented abilities. The Tresh have fixed that programming bug and made the zombies far better at annihilation.

A formulaic cross-genre work

With her novels Finders Keepers, Gabriel's Ghost, An Accidental Goddess and Games of Command, Linnea Sinclair won numerous SF-romance awards and established herself as a leading practitioner of the form. Her latest novel, The Down Home Zombie Blues, continues those books' trademark mix of SF, romance, adventure and humor, as it demonstrates her knack for creating tough heroines and intriguing heroes and adds a successful strain of police-procedural fiction. It's no surprise the publisher is poising The Down Home Zombie Blues as a breakout novel.

However, The Down Home Zombie Blues follows the same formula as Gabriel's Ghost: feisty alien military woman and sexy alpha-male warrior fall for each other in a media-cliche SF setting. On the plus side, good-guy homicide detective Theo Petrakos sidesteps the bad-boy alpha-male stereotype of Gabriel's Ghost. On the minus side, the SF of The Down Home Zombie Blues is even more generic than that of Gabriel's Ghost. It's natural for SF-media fan Theo to perceive Jorie's advanced technology in terms of Star Trek and Star Wars. But he does so because the book's SF elements—the mix of starships and "beam-me-up" transporters, the warring interstellar civilizations, etc.—are entirely derived from SF movies, shows and games, right down to an alien language that sounds like English and an alien being that looks like a Wookiee and is explicitly compared to same. For the hard-core SF-literature fan, accustomed to imaginative extrapolation by the likes of Charles Stross and Catherine Asaro and Arthur C. Clarke, The Down Home Zombie Blues will prove disappointing.

But that's not likely to matter. Many people raised on media SF are taking up the habit of reading SF. And many fans of the futuristic and paranormal romances published in other genres (romance, horror, mystery, young adult, mainstream) are crossing over to the SF romances published as SF. For these new or inexperienced SF readers, The Down Home Zombie Blues is accessible. For these folks, the novel may well serve as a gateway to more challenging, non-media-influenced SF literature. Perhaps The Down Home Zombie Blues will even serve as a gateway to more ambitious, more imaginative SF in the future novels of Linnea Sinclair. She has the talent to create interesting, original worlds.