In all my years of reading horror, apocalypse and sci-fi books I have never seen the old movie gimmick of a man and woman landing on top of each other in a book. That being said, this book was ok, the only not crazy female character kept getting teary eyed. I found it a bit predictable, very light reading, but still enjoyable. ( )

http://www.gordsellar.com/2009/12/05/... ( )

A gripping, fun read. I enjoyed Maberry's Pine Deep trilogy, but this book surpasses that and I look forward to reading Joe Ledger and his team again. ( )

An entertaining read. Lots of fast-paced, well-written action, with generally believable characters. Even the science of the zombies is believable from the perspective of the genre, with obvious embellishments and shortcuts where needed. My only real quibble is the philosophizing some of the characters seem to do in the middle of intense action, which is exactly the moment someone would not stop to think about deeper meanings.

Overall very enjoyable, especially if you're a fan of the genre. ( )

A group headed by terrorists have found a way to create zombies and plan on releasing this weapon on the world. Only, Joe Ledger, a Baltimore detective can save us. Hired by the government to lead a fight against the enemy, Ledger shows off his skills from beginning to end. Fast paced, creepy and thrilling, you can't stop.
An exciting man versus zombie with a military feel story that
keeps you wanting for more. Jonathan Maberry has delivered once again. ( )

A new twist on Jihad. This one has some mad scientist funded by a US billionare to cook up a viral strain that turns people into zombies. Joe Ledger is everybody's dream cop. He oozes muscle and attitude on every page. Toss in a secret government agency and the walking dead and you will be up late reading this book. One of my favorites for the year. ( )

If Green Lantern Hal Jordan is The Man Without Fear, then police officer Joe Ledger is The Man Without Hesitation. The Green Lantern reference is actually explicit in the novel, as the head scientist points out that Joe Ledger is the secret identity of the Marvel Comics analogue of Green Lantern - Dr Spectrum. There is in fact a Marvel Zombies ad at the back of the book, too. With a few more references throughout.

This lack of hesitation with either handgun or hands and feet saves Joe's life when he comes across a rather shocking terrorist. It also brings him to the attention of the Department of Military Science and their recruiters. (Yes, it is a thriller, you have to have a clandestine yank government department). I think it is close to mandatory that you have a traitor when you have a secret department, too. Particularly if the head of such is a man of mystery. When they bring him in for an interview, he is extremely surprised to discover the terrorist he killed is still walking around, even if zombified.

The DMS have come across this before, to their great cost - which is why they need Ledger's so far survivability skills - as run of the mill agents and soldiers freeze up or freak out when facing zombies. Which is a pretty reasonable reaction.

There's also a middle eastern terrorist plot, a supervillain biologist-billionaire team-up, and of course a coming attack on the USA to deal with along with a lot of zombie killing.

There are some minor problems - the only bisexual character, proclivities highlighed in detail is the amoral evil assistant - although apparently military types aren't allowed to talk about that, so perhaps more likely here.

Also, the clue from captured dying terrorist flunkie researcher is obvious to everybody reading the book - except for the geniuses at the DMS who are supposed to be a lot smarter than us, and have super software apparently way ahead of Carnivore and Echelon.

Still, Joe is an engaging character. So much so that the part of the books with the supervillains as viewpoint characters you want to finish, so you can get back to Ledger and his hardarsed arsekickery with his new team.

I'll call this a 3.75 rounded up, because hey, bonus points for Squadron Supreme references.

http://notfreesf.blogspot.com/2009/10... ( )

A good story about a terrorist plot to beat the US...by using zombies! The book was okay, but kind of corny in some spots. I think I just need to realize nothing is going to top 'World War Z' when it comes to the zombie book genre. Still a good read though. ( )

Patient Zero is my first experience reading anything written by Jonathan Maberry. I picked it up wanting a book about zombies and possibly a bit of chaos. I was not disappointed on either front. The action is continuous and by the end you feel almost as exhausted as Joe Ledger must with the continual ups and downs. The only thing slightly off in the narrative is how men and women who have picked so much up from the tiniest of facial cues and body movements miss something rather vital in a fairly easy to decipher dialogue. Other then that, a fun read. A good way to waste a day or two. ( )

I read Mayberry's Ghost Road Blues / Dead Man's Song / Bad Moon Rising trilogy and was decidedly underwhelmed. They were fine, but for roughly 1600 pages of commitment, I was expecting significantly more.

I have to say that since that with "Patient Zero", Mayberry has 1) found an editor (thankfully) and 2) written a fun, fast paced, hybrid horror thriller. The prose is sufficiently hard boiled, the action hard edged and elegantly written, and the plot was faced paced and fun.

The book reads like a mash-up of King's "Cell," Preston/Child's "Diogenes Trilogy," and Clancy's "Sum of All Fears." If you enjoyed any of those, you'll definitely enjoy "Patient Zero." ( )

The summer I turned 30, I went to Great America with my two sisters and one brother-in-law. We rode The Screaming Eagle rollercoaster, one of those wooden rebuilds of old-time coasters, which (at the time) had the longest drop on the first hill of any rollercoaster in the world. As we reached the top of that hill, my sister turned to me and said, “It’s been nice knowing you.” Sure enough, that first drop about killed me; even worse (or better, depending on your perspective) was the series of corkscrew turns at high speed that came toward the end of the ride. I screamed so much that I completely lost my voice. Of course we rode the thing at least twice more that day. I had a ball.

You’re probably wondering what this story has to do with Patient Zero. Well, substitute reading this book for riding that rollercoaster. It has all the same thrills, scares, horrifying drops and corkscrew turns. And I loved it at least as much as I loved The Screaming Eagle.

Jonathan Maberry is the Stoker-award-winning author of Ghost Road Blues, Dead Man's Song and Bad Moon Rising, all of which I now plan to read as soon as possible, because damn, this guy can write. In an age when horror is said to be dead, Maberry is breathing new life into the genre, along with Joe Hill, Laird Barron and John Langan. It seems to me that we’re headed for an age of horror unlike anything we’ve seen since the days when Stephen King had a million imitators, all of whom were publishing books with black and red covers. The only difference is that – at least for right now – the quality of the books on the shelves is very high indeed.

The premise of Patient Zero is that zombies are the newest terrorist threat. Yes, I know, zombies. I’m not a fan of zombies myself, but in Maberry’s hands, they actually make a kind of sense. Using a technique borrowed from science fiction, Maberry explains zombies as a prion disease made communicable by a genius of a scientist who just happens to be an Islamic fundamentalist set on destroying the United States. Or wait -- is the villain really the scientist, or someone else? Someone with a more American point of view having to do with profit? There is no shortage of evildoers in this novel.

The viewpoint character is Joe Ledger, a Baltimore police detective who is recruited by a shadowy federal agency fighting terrorism by all means possible, known as the Department of Military Science. (The Constitution and other legal protections don’t seem to have much play here, and in fact seem ludicrously naïve.) Ledger isn’t quite superhuman, but he comes close: he is astonishingly fast and never hesitates in completing his mission, no matter the obstacles thrown in his path. Either he thinks extremely quickly, or he simply turns off his brain and moves; it’s hard to tell which. Fortunately, though, he’s got brains as well as reflexes, and he is a delight to read in his first-person narration of the efforts of the DMS to fight the zombie threat.

The only flaw I can identify in this book is that an obvious clue goes unraveled by the very smart people in the DMS until the absolute last minute. Even then, the tension generated by Maberry’s sharp writing is only accentuated, as the reader thinks, “Come on, come on, don’t you get it?” and mentally urges the characters to figure it out.

Blurbs on the book suggest that it is the first of a series. I do hope so. Ledger will be an interesting character to follow, rather in the vein of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, only in the horror genre rather than the mystery/thriller genre. I hope that Maberry has the success that Child has enjoyed, because he deserves it. ( )

Joe Ledger was just a cop, protecting his country. Afterwards, he is approached by the DMS (Department of Military Science) and has to kill the same man twice. His entire world view goes out of control after that. He joins the DMS and finds out about an insane terrorist plot to release a zombie virus on United States soil. Joe has to head a team of talented military men that he barely knows to foil the terrorist plan that could end the world.

This book was a great mixture of military fiction and a zombie novel. Most zombie novels are from a civilian's perspective, so it was interesting to see inside an all-powerful secret government agency in their quest to stop the zombie apocalypse. There is definitely no shortage of zombie carnage. This was one of the bloodiest books I have ever read and I'm no slouch; I've read lots of horror novels

The characters are fleshed out and realistic. Joe is a smart ass, but a dedicated cop with an interesting psychological profile. Grace Courtland was at a first a hard-ass, humorless bitch, but upon further inspection was found to be an emotional person with a tragic past. One of my favorite characters is Rudy, Joe's psychiatrist and best friend. He provides comic relief and a voice of reason for Joe, who is trying to deal with his world turned upside down. The book is in multiple narrations from various characters, including Gault, the greedy supplier of money for the terrorists, and Amirah, his insane scientist lover. The plot from both sides of this war made the book enjoyable to read. It also had me guessing how the two groups would intersect.

This book was very engrossing and attention-grabbing. If you like action, zombies, and the military, I would recommend that you read this book. ( )

Joe Ledger is a Baltomore, PD Det. He is part of a team that raids a terrorist hideout and partakes in the shoot out where a number of terrorists are killed.
He is recruited into a new secret agency. DMS Dept. of Medical Science. The man in charge, Mr. Church tells him he must first subdue the man in the interview room. When Joe enters the room, the man jumps up and tries to bite him. Joe is horrorfied to see that he's one of the men he killed. Now the man is a zombie like person.
The terrorists have devised a means where they give a terrorist a pill and when the person is killed, then they come back with an infection. They try to kill everyone they see thereby making them infection also zombie types. DMS call these people Dead Men Walking or Walkers.
In Afghanistan, Sebastian Gault is selling biotechnical info to the terrorists. He owns a pharmacitucal company. He hopes that when these infected people are set loose in America. We will need a cure and the pharmacitucal industry will make billions.
Church tells Joe that two of their response teams were wiped out when they went to the hosp where two walkers began killing people. Everyone in the hosp became infected and when the teams arrived they were taken unaware and killed. Now Joe must form another team to take charge of the fight against the terrorists.
This is a well done dale. Mixes thriller, horror and action novel. Characters are memorable and Joe is called a hero in waiting.
Recommended. ( )

Patient Zero is a that post-9/11 thriller designed to explain to you exactly what would make a terrorist attack even more frightening. The answer? Zombies.

Joe Ledger is your a-typical special-ops guy with a sketchy psychological past, near super-human fighting skills and a best friend that is part comedic relief and all grounding force (in this case, best-friend and shrink). When he finds himself killing the same terrorist in the same week, he finds himself drawn into the strange world of the DMS and a plot to unleash a Zombie virus onto U.S. soil in the form of a terrorist attack. If they'd only not discovered the likely plant of a double-agent during their trial-by fire, they might have a better-than-slim chance of beating this thing...

While the plot may sound like it could fall heavily into cliche, the presence of a competing storyline from the virus inventor point of view brings a much-needed depth of dimension to the story. The 400-page book is actually broken into 125 chapters, so you'll find Jonathan Mayberry flipping you back and forth between story lines very quickly. It's a very clever idea and just as one piece of the puzzle drops into place, Mayberry flashes about 6 more pieces you'll need to place. ( )

http://geekylibrarian.wordpress.com/2... ( )

Awesome book. Like 24 meets Dawn of the Dead. For fans of zombies and thrillers alike. ( )

This book has absolutely NO socially redeeming value. It is filled with zombies, action, and tons of fun. I can't believe I actually enjoyed a zombie book. ( )

I took this book with me on a flight from Omaha, NE to Panama City, FL and back and it made the hours on the planes and in the airports seem like they just didn't happen. This book takes one part Tom Clancy, one part Joeseph Wambaugh, and one part George Romero and ends up with an intelligent, action-packed, zombie thriller with just enough violence, mayhem, and gore to satisfy anyone who loves zombies.

Hard-boiled detective takes on terrorist zombies. Cool! ( )

(Amy) I really expected to like this book. After all, I have very low standards when it comes to zombie stories, and this book was being fairly substantially hyped, so I thought it would surely meet the requirements.

Yeah, well, not so much. Kudos, though, for having scientific zombies - especially prion zombies. I hadn't encountered that one before, only virus ones. In fact, I don't really have any quibbles with the zombie part of the story at all. If there'd been more zombies and less of the idiot protagonist (and, for the love of god and all things holy, no damned sentence fragments - what is up with that, anyway? There are sentence fragments in a distressing number of published works lately), I would probably have liked it just fine. Unfortunately, the protagonist is a schmuck, and I am sad that he didn't get eaten by a zombie. It's a first-person narrative, too, which means every second I spent reading the thing was spent immersed in the guy's head. Ugh. (Of course, I don't like first-person narratives at the best of times, which this definitely wasn't.)

I think this was a zombie book for the action-book reader, not for the zombie-book reader, anyway. And while I like action movies just fine, action books are definitely not for me. Explosions? Gunfights? Awesome on screen, boring as all get-out to read. And zombie stories are supposed to have a visceral component (in a non-literal sense, I mean, though there's usually quite a bit of actual viscera around, too) - they're supposed to make you care about the people who are watching their loved ones turn into mindless killing machines. A zombie movie isn't about how big the explosions are or how many rounds of ammo you use up (though zombie video games have a component of that), and they're not about mowing down crowds of nameless zombies, either (even though there's usually some of that, too). They're about having to shoot your best friend in the head when he suddenly starts trying to take a bite out of your arm. Zombies are a demoralizing and deeply terrifying threat. This version of them was distinctly underwhelming. For this and other reasons, the book was sadly lacking in the emotional impact department, though at least it did acknowledge that its protagonist was kind of lacking in the emotional department himself.

Anyway, it's not a bad book, and if I didn't have such a thing for the zombie sub-genre I probably would have been perfectly content with it, though probably still wouldn't actively recommend it (it's the goddamned sentence fragment thing, and I'm not getting over that anytime soon). As it is, though . . . enh.
( http://weblog.siliconcerebrate.com/ze... ) ( )

A very fun (and sometimes scary) book...
http://www.madnessabides.com/2009/06/... ( )

This was a fun, fast read full of non-stop action that delivered exactly what it promised, no more and no less. A police detective is recruited by a secret government agency to stop an impending release of zombies by Islamic terrorists on an unsuspecting American public. The zombie scourge is caused by genetically-manipulated prions; these zombies are "fast movers," more akin to those in 28 Days Later than the George Romero kind. The action is fast and furious, with vivid, well-described combat sequences throughout the book. It would probably make a fun summer action movie.

It's not entirely clear how the protagonist, Joe Ledger, a detective who has never been in combat becomes such a killing machine. We are told many times that he is simply hero material, so we just have to accept that, I guess. He generally deals better with trauma than most of the Special Forces troops placed under his command (which is an odd arrangement, but again, we are asked to accept that). This need to suspend disbelief is common in both technothrillers and horror novels, so it's not out of place, or any more egregious than in most novels of either genre.

There are a few silly bits in the book, however:

* It's typical of technothrillers, I suppose, but it's darn silly to provide makes and models of every piece of equipment mentioned, including gym bags and watches. It could be a subtle gibe at the genre, I supposes, but there's not enough evidence for that argument.

* Everyone refers colloquially to the Department of Homeland Security as "Homeland." That's unrealistic. I worked for ten years in government service , including two there, and everyone, civilian, military, law enforcement, intelligence, refers to it as "DHS." Likewise, Maberry has named the "black ops" organization the Department of Military Sciences ("Science" on the back cover), which is also silly. "Department" has a very specific meaning in government parlance, and it doesn't work here. Also, "Homeland" is often used as a generic term for the U.S. intelligence community, as though DHS had the lead. That is almost never the case. DHS has a small intel shop of its own, but let's be honest: it's small, ineffectual, not particularly influential, and half the people working there are detailed from other agencies, either inside or outside the department. On matters like the ones depicted in the book, CIA and FBI would have the lead. I tended to mentally substitute "the IC" for "Homeland" because all those references really irked me.

* "Hooah" is (sadly) not just a Ranger term, it's widely used throughout the army (and I've heard it used by the other services s well).

* Perhaps the silliest bit of all: one of the major characters is a British woman who is purportedly a major in Britain's SAS who heads up one of DMS' field teams. Now, to the best of my knowledge, women are not permitted in the SAS, so her background doesn't make sense, and why would a British citizen be recruited into an elite, "black" combat unit? If she had been described as a liaison officer, I might accept it, but she's not. There's really no good reason for her to be a Brit in any case. It's a bit of an oddity.

Little things like that. I hate to criticize a book for such niggling errors, but when a technothriller purports to depict the military and intelligence comunity realistically, I do think that the book must be evaluated on its own terms and flaws have to be pointed out.

The book ends with closure -- the current threat has been decisively ended -- but it is clearly set up as the first book of a series. I liked this one well enough that I plan to pick up the next. Yes, the action and twists and turns of the plot are eminently predictable, but that's not always a bad thing. It's a fun, light read, and I enjoyed it tremendously. If you like zombies and technothrillers, this is an obligatory purchase.

The publisher has also made available a short story that elaborates on the opening scene of the novel, which you can sign up to receive at http://us.macmillan.com/author/jonath...

Review copyright 2009 J. Andrew Byers ( )

Patient Zero follows Joe Ledger, a hard, no-nonsense cop in Boston who is facing a hearing because of the his fatal shooting of a suspect – Joe isn’t worried, though. The hearing is merely for show since his actions were legal in every way, but the motions need to be gone through to satisfy those that need satisfying. Joe, however, is waylaid by two burly ear-piece-wearing men in suits, who take him to see a ‘Mr. Church’, and it’s from that moment on that Joe’s life spirals out of true… You see, Joe once again comes up against the same guy, a Middle Eastern terrorist, that he shot and killed earlier… But he’s dead, isn’t he? Well, dead he may be, but he’s also hungry, his skin is a bit on the grey side, and he snarls a lot… And now Joe has to contend with the fact that suicide bombers are going out of style and a new kind of bio-terrorism is being born…

Welcome to 21st Century zombies – and trust me on this one, you haven’t ever seen zombies like these before! (Check out the rest of my review here: http://davebrendon.wordpress.com/2009... ) ( )

Early Reviewer

I went into this book a little bit jaded, after all the premise has been done a million times by a wide variety of writers, what could possibly be new? Well there is nothing new at all about Patient Zero, you get exactly what you think you will. What changed this book for me though and the reason I think it deserves four stars is the fact that the author was able to pull me in to his story. He made me want to read it, even though I knew where it was going to end up, and that is a rare thing for an author to do. So as far as the story goes, yeah I have seen it before, and I will more than likely see it again, but this time it wasn't just 'another zombie book', it was something fun and enjoyable and that is something special that Mr. Maberry brought. ( )

Cliches fight zombies in the numbers game as all the boxes are ticked but nothing more on offer. ( )