Dread Nation

Jane McKeene is born two days before the dead start walking near Gettysburg. The shambler outbreak halts the Civil War and leaves America a harsher, stranger country. Seventeen years on, Jane is nearly done with her schooling at Miss Preston's School of Combat for Negro Girls, in Baltimore.

The school drills Black and Indigenous children in weapons and etiquette so they can be hired out to protect wealthy families from the dead. Jane would rather be back home in Kentucky. Her plans shift when daughters of prominent families begin to vanish.

With her classmate and rival Katherine Devereaux, Jane uncovers a conspiracy that reaches into the highest offices of power. Her reward is exile west, to Summerland, a fortified town in Kansas. There she learns that the shamblers are only one of the threats she has to survive, because the country around her still runs on old hatreds.

This is alternate-history horror with a zombie outbreak at its centre, told from Jane's point of view. It mixes combat, mystery and conspiracy, and the danger comes as much from the living and their prejudice as from the dead.