The public was not properly notified due to the efforts of the government to hush it up. By time the characters reach the US, it is clear that the virus has hold. This virus infects the living turning you into a mindless flesh eating zombie, but it keeps you alive. These "living zombies" are fast and can chase you down as the never wear out. The other form is the more traditional Romero zombie, slow shamblers. Formerly fast zombies (ones killed without a headshot)can be killed the same way any person can, however they will wake up again as shamblers. Shamblers can be killed with a headshot, but inflicting damage anywhere else does not kill them.

This book has everything from an all out assualt and military defenses to close quarters battles and shut in sieges. There is plenty of action to keep you interested and the writting is of solid quality. The only issue maybe that the characters are bit more shallow than I would like. I'm a big fan of indirectly fleshing out characters, its a way of working in little kernels of info on them that will make characters a little bit more real. That's not to say the characters wre not interesting, far from it.

In the end Plague of the Dead intorduce little new to the genre. Even so, Recht managed to take the sacrificial hero, paranoia, and outright terror of survival to twist them into a cohesive and exciting reading experience. This is book that I had a hard time setting down, in my mind that is the best mark of good book.