Attempting to fill the void left by her Newsflesh Trilogy, Mira Grant gives us another near-future made dystopic by a health cure gone wrong. This first entry in the Parasitology series brings us likeable characters, a quasi-believable medical threat (though to be honest far less plausible than how she envisioned zombies), corrupt business practices, mad egomaniacal scientists, strained family relationships and two sweet dogs.
The second book in Mira Grant's Newsflesh series is just as compelling as the first, though I don't like the narrative voice quite as much. (It's a boy.) This time the focus is less on media (though of course blogging and fancy tech are still major elements) and more on medicine, medical ethics in particular.
This is one of those popular books that is so popular you don't want to read it, and then it turns out to be as good as the hype. It's a sort of biography/history/science story about the cancer cells of a poor, black mother-of-five who got cancer in a time when medical ethics were more highly evolved for animals than for humans.