This is a prequel to The Girls with all the Gifts, and it’s just as good. Like GWAG, the juicy parts of the book are not the physical dangers so much as the inner conflicts of the team as they search the ruins of Earth for a clue on how to stop the plague that has wiped out most of the population and replaced them with zombie like creatures they call ‘hungries.’
As the team wanders around England in a combination biological lab and mechanical tank behemoth, they come across a curious girl of about 9 or 10 that defies the profile creature they’re used to seeing. She’s blood thirsty, like a mindless hungry, but seems to have retained brain function. And soon the team discovers more of this anomalies, all her age or younger. And when threatened, they can be extremely dangerous.
But, since they appear almost human, the team must gain their trust in order to find out how they’re surviving, and in finding the key to that, perhaps finding an antidote to the Earth killing virus.
So, who’s the bigger danger–the plague, the Hungries, their fellow human survivors, or their own inner demons?