Trent has engineered a face-to-face meeting with the team because he needs their urgent help in recovering a code book from a secret Umbrella facility in Utah that is due to go online in a matter of days. The man is none other than Trent, the shadowy informant who has given the team crucial, but cryptic, information about Umbrella in the past. Halfway through the flight, Leon gets up to use the bathroom, only to be interrupted by a mysterious man emerging from the cockpit. After a spectacular car chase and gunfight, the team manage to get to the airfield and take off before reinforcements arrive. With many of the S.T.A.R.S members hiding in Europe, the remaining members of the resistance against Umbrella ( Leon, Claire, Rebecca, John and David) are driving to a private airfield in Maine with a plan to join up with them when several cars filled with Umbrella’s henchmen give chase. With all evidence of the zombie plague destroyed, the nefarious Umbrella Corporation has pulled some strings and placed most of the blame for the incident on both the city’s police chief and the members of the force’s elite S.T.A.R.S unit.

Set in 1998, the novel begins with a series of news reports that detail the destruction of Raccoon City. This is the 1999 Pocket Books (US) paperback edition of “Resident Evil: Underworld” that I read. Needless to say, this review may contain some SPOILERS. So, let’s take a look at “Resident Evil: Underworld”. But, if you’re familiar with the first two “Resident Evil” videogames, you can probably get away with just reading the second novel ( “Resident Evil: Caliban Cove”) before reading this one. However, I should point out that, whilst this novel theoretically works as a stand-alone novel ( since there are a lot of recaps), the story and characters will make more sense if you’ve read the previous three novels before reading this one. Since I didn’t remember much about it other than reading the shockingly dramatic epilogue during a train journey, I was eager to see if it was still as dramatic as I remembered. This was a novel that I first read at some point during my mid-late teens. This is the fourth novel in Perry’s “Resident Evil” series ( you can find my reviews of the previous three books here, here and here) and it tells an original story that isn’t based on any of the “Resident Evil” videogames.

Well, since I seem to be going through a phase of reading spin-off novels, I thought that I’d take the opportunity to re-read S.D.Perry’s 1999 novel “Resident Evil: Underworld”.

Resident evil underworld book