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..