Restless in Peaceville by Pippa Jay

Source: Own collection
Format: Kindle ebook
Rating: 5 Stars
Reviewer: Laurel

Welcome to Peaceville, population 2067 and rising…from the grave…

Luke Chester has had enough. He’s the school geek, the girls laugh at him, he’s lost his dead-end job at the pizza place, and in the midst of the world’s messiest divorce his parents don’t even know he exists. An overdose of his mom’s tranquilizers and a stomach full of whiskey should solve all his problems…

But they don’t. Instead, Luke finds himself booted out of the afterlife for not dying a natural death, with nowhere to go but back to his recently vacated corpse and reality. How the hell is he going to pass for one of the living without someone trying to blow his brains out for being one of the undead?

And it just gets worse. He’s got to fight his own desperate craving to consume the living, evade the weird supernatural hunter who’s having a field day with the new undeads rising, and there’s this creepy black shadow following him around. Add to that the distraction of female fellow undead Annabelle burning to avenge her own murder, and clearly there’s no rest for the wicked. Jeez, all he wanted to do was R.I.P.

I cannot tell you on how many levels I love this book. The title. The first-person self-deprecating quips. The attention to detail (which is anything but boring). Fabulous stuff. Here’s a brief extract to illustrate my point:

For now, I can probably pass for just being sick, if I can get my coordination together and get out of here.

With that objective in mind, I lurch to my feet and fall flat on my face, luckily with one arm preventing my nose from getting smashed. Not that it hurts, but I really don’t need to make myself look any worse. I push back onto my hands and knees, grab the edge of the table beside me, and then pull myself up slow and easy. At least I’m standing, even if I am swaying like I’m still getting hit by the alcohol.

Restless in Peaceville is nothing like Jay’s previous offerings – all of which, it should be noted, have been in the SFR genre – in terms of quality. It’s better. WAY better. The other novels and novellas got five stars from me… perhaps I should go and revise them all down to four, because I can’t give this one more than five stars – much as I’d dearly love to.

For me, Jay just matured as a writer. Up till now there was only one author who I’d turn to as an example of how to write in the first person. Now I have two.

Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

**I should note that zombies are not my preferred subject choice. Scenes at the end of the book got a little too gory and graphic for me.