Jailbait Zombie. Where can you go after a title like that? Quite far, actually, if your name is Mario Acevedo.

I didn’t quite know what to expect from this book, but I honestly didn’t expect much. I expected a bit of Laurell K. Hamilton or something. At most, an unfunny romp full of innuendo and lame obligatory kinky sex scenes. Piercings, obviously. And a stupid hero who would make me want to throw up. That’s what I expected. To be honest, I’m not sure why I started reading it in the first place.

But, once I’d begun, I rather actually enjoyed it.

It felt very much a tip of the hat to the hardboiled crime genre, with a neat rolling plot. Its format is strictly crime. Its hero is strictly an ex-military turned PI hero (if for a moment you forget the fangs in his face). The seedy underbelly is typical crime-style seedy underbelly. Only the criminals had been changed from drug dealers to zombie-raisers. Same thing, really, only zombies smell better than junkies.

Mister Acevedo’s style is easy to follow and light rather than grim. He fits in closer to the crime genre than the horror genre, and while it’s a big trend to mix the two these days – especially as our hero is yet another vampire – it’s done without the usual yawn-along romance twaddle the genre carries like a backpack full of dirty undies. Mister Acevedo’s chosen to follow a more crime-focussed plot and kept his action rolling along to keep readers like me tuned in without trying to be overly clever or treat me like the moron I know I am. He gives me a little more credit than your average writer of these kind of novels – something I find peculiar from a man whose books include the cheeky titles of The Nymphos of Rocky Flats and The Undead Kama Sutra.

With a title like Jailbait Zombie, though, I think he really took the cake and ate it, too. My only worry was that, by the end of the novel, Mister Acevedo had written a tight, well-constructed little hardboiler and the only really cheesy kind of token cheekiness was in the title. I’m not sure whether to feel relieved, or disappointed, to tell the truth. Whatever the truth to my inner psyche, I was impressed by this novel. Impressed enough to give the others a go without feeling a little on the pervy side for reading something with a title like this.

I mean, Jailbait Zombie. Not really the kind of book you’d like anyone to see you reading on a train, is it? Trying to explain to them “it’s not that kind of book” would be like trying to tell them you only read Playboy for the articles…