The Death Cure

[sawyl]

Finishing up with James Dashner's The Death Cure, the last in his Maze Runner series. I'm not sure it quite sticks the dismount but it was diverting enough.

Having survived a testing maze and made their way through the scorch and a city full of people infected with a mind-altering plague, Thomas and his friends have finally made it to the headquarters of WICKED, the organisation dedicated to finding a cure for the disease. But when Thomas learns that his pre-maze memories are going to be restored, he rebels, deciding that he doesn't want to go back to being the fanatic he was before his early memories were erased.

Under murky circumstances, Thomas, Newt and Minho, the three original Gladers, along with Jorge and Brenda, two people they met in the Scorch city, escape and flee to Denver. Here they find a city in turmoil, where the infected are officially held outside the city in a place called the Crank Palace, but where, in reality, the barriers are starting to fail, with more and more near-zombies wandering around the place. Attempting to find help, the group learn of the Right Arm, an organisation who have decided that WICKED are never going to be able to create their much-heralded cure for the Flare and that the world would be better off trying to improve things for the infected and those yet to be infected.

The book does a good job of conjuring the fearful world of the uninfected, with live in Denver portrayed as tenuous and uncertain, where almost everyone is living with the potential death sentence of the Flare, a disease that everyone gets eventually and which kills almost everyone it infects in the nastiest way possible. The flow of action feels a bit less successful — the way events unfold feel a little arbitrary — some of characters don't really work — I've spent the entire trilogy waiting for Theresa to snap into focus but it never really happens — and it relies too heavily on Thomas' gut feelings, all of which turn out to be correct. Still, I'm not really the target audience, so your milage may vary...