Customer Reviews

Jailbait Zombie (Felix Gomez, Book 4)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

OK, right from the start let me say that Mario Acevedo and his signature character, Felix Gomez, are not for everyone. Even the names of his four novels are off-setting; "The Nymphos Of Rocky Flats", "X-Rated Bloodsuckers", "The Undead Kama Sutra", and this, his fourth installment, "Jailbait Zombie." Yet make no mistake about it, Acevedo is a craftsman who grows and matures with each new effort. Imagining his work as a movie would conjure images of Quentin Tarantino doing George Romero.

Acevedo has created a plausible world of modern vampires that rivals that of Charlie Huston (see "Half The Blood In Brooklyn"). Both series portray the vampire world as coexisting in our modern world but in highly secretive fashion, with Gomez governed by and assisting, at times, the Araneum, a governing council for vampire behavior. While the texture and mood of their modern day vampire worlds are clearly different in the renderings of Huston and Acevedo, the vampire/human relationships and interactions and the philosophy, "laws", and governing structure underpinning their worlds are fun to unravel. For example, Felix is an enforcer for the Araneum whose main objective is to prevent any revelation that vampires or zombies or anything other than normal human beings exist on the planet. Felix is both enforcer and clean-up man for the governing council.

In "Jailbait Zombie", Felix is sent to the Denver area to ascertain who is reanimating dead beings into zombies and destroy all evidence of them, and, concomitantly, to find who or what is the source of flashes of psychic energy emanating from the area that may be disturbing the astral plane. No sooner does he arrive in the area, than he is beset with mafia minions, unexplained zombie attacks, and a dying 16-year old, Phaedra Nardoni, who wants him to turn her into a vampire to escape the ravages of Huntington's Chorea. Turning an innocent violates both Felix's and the Araneum's code but this young lady has the psychic ability to read his thoughts and to punish him with powerful and humbling blasts of psychic energy.

Felix is investigating the undead and seeking the reanimator when he is captured, tortured, and toyed with by the proverbial "mad scientist" behind it all. Before the novel winds down, Felix and his fellow enforcer and sometime lover, Jolie, do some serious [...] while Felix is forced into making life changing decisions for Phaedra as well as for himself. Actually, the psychological aspects and demands on Felix's character are an intriguing underlying current in Acevedo's novels.

I enjoy reading the details of the rules and procedures for vampires living among the humans in Felix's life. For example, his joy at eating hot Mexican food laced with whole blood, or the various outcomes of his "fanging" a human along with how he controls the enzymes that have various functions in the process. Vampires can exist in sunlight as long as they wear sunblock and make-up, vampires enjoy making love and having sex, and vampires are not affected by religious symbols (crosses, holy water, etc). Acevedo creates interesting fully fleshed characters and his plots are often unique to this genre. I heartily recommend this series to fans of vampire literature or of supernatural noir.

Mario Acevedo is one of my favorite authors, and he continues to deliver.
So far the series has been absolutely amazing. I finished Jailbait zombie in a single night, and it is not a short book. I could not put down..
Highly recommend all of this series..

This is another fun, fast paced installment from Acevedo. A great blend of tempo, suspense, and humor.

No, really realistic. You see, Felix Gomez is a vampire. You know that, otherwise how did you get this far in the series? A Vet, a vampire and REALLY good at kicking butt. But there is always somebody bigger than you, somebody with bigger boots and no problems with using them. Felix Gomez, in this book, ends up going against powers that make all the other plots look simple. And I am not just talking about the zombies.
Still full of the blood, cool guns and fights, yet, once again, don't believe the cover. This has one sex scene but is not oozing with it. The story is all important - nothing is over done and yet nothing is wasted. Sex is not used as filler like it is in HBO's TrueBlood.
Felix may be a Hero but he is less than perfect. And, like in the other books, sometimes victory isn't about winning as much as not losing. And that makes for a good story, a good ending, and a lot of character development.

This book is a good, campy, fun read. It has a lot of action in small spaces and a lot of searching. Near the end, you wonder if the editor got bored; there are plenty of avoidable mistakes near the end, for a book that should have been edited. However, I still give this book a 4 because the mistakes are small in relation to everything else and focusing on them takes away from what the book is really about. Acevedo has invented perhaps the greatest challenge for Felix yet. If you enjoy the lure of vampires and the stupidity of humankind, this book is for you.

His superiors at the worldwide vampiric association the Araneum send private investigator Felix Gomez to Denver. His assignment is two-fold. First the vampire is to destroy a zombie infestation in the Mile High City and suburbs like Aurora; and more important insure the maker is out of the reanimation business permanently.

Felix begins to follow the deadly Zombie path which leads him to teenage Phaedra Nardoni, who is dying from Huntington's chorea. The sixteen years old sends Felix on a hallucinatory spin back to his days as a grunt in Iraq. She threatens to keep piling on the illusionary flashbacks until she dies unless he converts her to an undead. Before he can decide what to do, the zombie creator abducts Felix.

The fourth Gomez urban fantasy (and Rocky Mountains) Noir (see X-RATED BLOODSUCKERS, THE NYMPHOS OF ROCKY FLATS and THE UNDEAD KAMA SUTRA) is as zany as the private investigator's previous cases. Besides dealing with zombies and their reanimator, Felix must cope with a brilliant, talented but dying teen that provides the "jailbait" aspects of the title. As always in this wacky but always entreating series filled with blood, gore and an over the top of the Rockies premise; this time even George Romero will take notice of controlling the world domination through zombies in space.

Harriet Klausner

This is a super novel and a great read,,need more authors likes this,good form and great body...very smooth to the mind..........