"Hotbed" by Bryan Cassiday kicks off with Phoebe taking a wild ride. Suspecting her seemingly squeaky-clean mayor husband of cheating, she stumbles into a full-blown nightmare in their Southern California town. A virus turns people into crazy cannibals, and suddenly, it's a quarantine party.

Things get real when Phoebe, with her no-nonsense vet friend Meredith, hits the streets only to find chaos. A helicopter starts shooting without warning, and bam, quarantine time. Cassiday keeps you hooked with twists and turns, and the friendship between Phoebe and Meredith adds a cool touch.

Now, I'm not really into zombies. If there's one horror thing that scares me, it's zombies. But, surprisingly, this was still an engaging read, and the cast of characters was diverse and interesting.

Full disclosure: I got a copy from the author via LibraryThing, but all opinions are my own.

I found this an incredibly frustrating book to read. It seemed to me like some aspects of the story were missing (eg. the length of time the mayor had been fraternizing with the prostitute was not very clear when it came to the assumptions that Phoebe made and then undecidedly attempted to act upon…), but what frustrated me the most was the indecisiveness of Phoebe. She was a very irritating character, especially in the strange and bizarre scenario she found herself in. ( )

This book wasn’t exactly to my taste. I didn’t like the writing style and the attachment to the characters felt very forced. By saying the same thing about one character the entire time, instead of creating a signature character trait, it just gets a bit annoying. Like yes, phoebe makes bad choices, meredith prefers animals over people and phoebe’s father will always prioritise the truth. But I can remember that you know? There’s no need to mention it that many times. That way I didn’t exactly feel any connection to the characters and wasn’t very phased //spoiler// When most of them died… I will say that the premise was intriguing and sounded good but the execution was a bit less. ( )

Not so hot...
What sounded like an action-packed race for survival turned out to be a long-winded story about a woman who not only made one dumb wrong decision after another, but even admitted to do so repeatedly.
Phoebe is married to the mayor and discovers he is cheating on her. Does she confront him? No: she expects him to confess everything after dropping a few mysterious hints. Does she leave him? No: she is afraid to loose her sheltered life. Does she blame him? Yes, at first she does, but then she comes to the conclusion that the prostitute he is seeing is to blame for his infidelity. So she decides to force Val to leave town and everything will be back to normal (really?!). But when she arrives at Val's home, she hears awful sounds which make her believe that Val must have killed someone. Does she call the police? No: of course not, she is the mayor's wife and can't be related to this part of town or this kind of woman. So she decides to take her best friend Meredith along to investigate what happened in order to blackmail Val. On and on it goes with Phoebe and her weird, naive and absolutely unworldly decisions, which lead her to a situation where she is trapped in a hotel in the middle of the quarantine zone...
It took half of the book to get Phoebe there, and it took some while longer before she realized the deadly danger outside must come from some kind of zombie outbreak. While the plot involved some other characters - the mayor himself, the hitman he hires to remove some threat to his career, Courtney who works at the hotel, and Phoebe's father who is a reporter and wants to investigate what's going on in town - their main common characteristic was their ability to make wrong decisions and get themselves in trouble.
At some point, I tried to interpret the book as some kind of strange parody, but even that didn't work and in the end I was even disappointed to see Phoebe survive (but glad it was over).
The premise of the book was really interesting and could have been made into a really decent zombie novel, but unfortunately it didn't meet up with my expectations. So I guess reading this book was my dumb decision here.. ( )

Writing style did not draw me in, dialogue was not compelling, and the setup was repetitive and awkward. As a result, I didn't get all that far ( )