Temperature: Dead and Rising by Adam Santo

3.5 stars from me

Sci-fi/fantasy isn’t a genre I usually read (although I confess to having loved the Twilight series), so it took me a little while to get to grips with the premise of main character Sally being undead.

The opening scene in the morgue was great, very atmospheric. The bit where Bo and Sally first drive off in a car was again very good, it had a realistic feel to it. Overall, I thought the world created by Santo was great, with the Church being the bad guys and heaps of mistrust and suspicion throughout everyone else – even though they were effectively on the same side.

The descriptions of magic and spells were all believable and it was easy to follow the concept that Sally has greater powers than expected which I guess will develop further in future books.

I’ve stuck at 3.5 stars for a few reasons, there were a couple of areas where it was a little confusing, there were a few typos and I felt it just fell short of having a killer hook.

Having said that I think, especially for the teen market, this debut novel has the makings of a great series, Temperature: Dead and Rising was inventive, packed full of magic and fantasy with a healthy dose of sexual tension and I think the rest of the series will improve and  develop as it goes along. It’s a nice touch that the book has a sprinkling of humour throughout which means that the story wasn’t scary!

Synopsis: Dark, funny, and filled with suspense, Temperature: Dead and Rising by new author Adam Santo is a wildly creepy fantasy—and a corpse of a good time. When Sally Mertill is driving a carload of her friends back to Green Mountain Falls after visiting Pike’s Peak they’ll careen off the side of the mountain. With no guardrails it’s not surprising there are no survivors. And yet within two days a not altogether bad fellow named Bocnic Drewings will call upon the metal drawer where her body awaits autopsy, open it, and lead her on the adventure of a lifetime—well, that’s if she’d have survived the accident. The powers that be have chosen Sally to become undead and she’s the only other person time eternal who’s been given the power to raise the dead—and control them. When leaders of rival undead clans find out, they either want to control or destroy her, which makes Sally staying undead a bit of a challenge.