Patient Zero

Patient Zero is the first book in the Joe Ledger series by Jonathan Mayberry. Joe Ledger is a Baltimore Detective who gets recruited by a secret government agency to head up a special task force created to deal with problems that Homeland Security can't handle. The team's first mission is to stop a group of terrorists from releasing a bio-weapon that can turn ordinary people into zombies and save the world.

Apparently reading a book about terrorists creating a zombie plague during a real pandemic worked for me as I enjoyed the hell out of this book. The story was just the right mix of action, horror, humor and camp. Joe is a character you can admire and a great action hero. He's a natural leader, good at tactics and not afraid to show show more emotions. Joe also has doubts and other human flaws to help keep him semi-relatable while also being a bad ass zombie slayer. The supporting cast is a lot of fun. Church, Joe's new boss, is an enigma wrapped in a mystery that I hope only partially gets revealed throughout the series. Rudy, Joe's best friend and a psychologist, is a person I'd love to have as a friend in real life. Echo Team is tough as nails (even the one named Bunny), their scientist Dr. Who Hu has all the toys, the lady on the team can rescue herself and the bad guys are mad scientist geniuses.

I was impressed by Mayberry's research. The science behind the plague the terrorists create is based on reality which naturally I had to go look up. Prion diseases are terrifying - google at your own risk. Thankfully they are also quite rare. Here's hoping nothing like this ever becomes a pandemic.

I listened to the audio book narrated by Ray Porter. He is amazing as always. I look forward to continuing the series on audio. show less

This book is a ton of fun, well-written, nerve-wracking, and different from anything else I've read in the zombie genre. In fact, in many ways this isn't really a zombie book at all.

The focus here is on the terrorism and bioengeering aspects - the disease they create makes what we'd call zombies, and that lends its own special brand of 'terrifying' to the general story, but overall this is a story about fighting those who will do horrible things to humanity for their own purposes.

Although the main character is a bit overly "special", I tend to like stories that involve the protagonist taking names and kicking ass in a way I sure never could - and he's got enough heart to keep me interested.

The twin tails of terrorists/scientists and show more the government team trying to stop them meshed nicely, with a few unexpected consequences and some surprises I hadn't quite expected.

On top of it, this zombie-black ops-thriller-tale managed to ask a few questions about humanity and what makes it and the choices we make.

Overall, a very fun read. Recommended if you like the genre! show less

Why read: Picked up a copy at BEA

What impressed me: I avoid books that involve the military and terrorism. They never seem to hold my interest. That said, Patient Zero, with its terrorists and covert governmental agencies blew my mind. It took a vast array of topics that don't interest me in the slightest and made me crave more. And it wasn't just the zombies I loved either, although there inclusion in the novel was a deciding factor in my reading this book. Joe Ledger is a normal man. Until he saw the zombies face to face, he never believed them possible. Now, he and his men are the only thing that can prevent the zombie apocalypse. What makes the novel easy to get sucked into is that Joe, for all his manliness and combat experience, show more doesn't just man up and get the job done. He questions things along the way. He worries for his own sanity. He joins the team, does the job, but retains his personality throughout. I can't wait to read his next adventure. Is it more zombies or something completely other?

What disappointed me: Not a thing.

Recommended: Absolutely. High powered action/adventure and zombie mayhem? It deserves a spot on most people's to be read piles.

Continue series: Definitely. I already have the second book on my shelf waiting to be read. show less

I've been meaning to read this one for a while, and somehow it just kept sliding down my TBR. Now that I've finally gotten around to it, though, I have to admit I found it pretty underwhelming.

The story is solid, and Maberry is clearly a master at writing action/fight scenes. And yet, the book still didn't work for me--on multiple levels. The biggest problem (for me) was the characters...or, rather, the lack of character. The characters here are little more than stereotypes, with the protagonist Joe Ledger being the biggest offender. Plenty of books survive fantastically with tough-guy protagonists of this make-up, whether you're looking at books by Lee Child or James Rollins or plenty of other authors who I really enjoy, but tough guys show more still have to be written as being real. As being more than stereotypes so that a reader can believe in them. In this book, Joe Ledger felt more like a video game protagonist than a character I could engage with, partly because we never saw any change or growth or development to him. I could see the author seeming to hint at it, or at least trying to, in a few moments, but it was too little too late, and never really believable because such development or individuality was given little more than lip service.

The characters who come closest to overcoming their base formula are actually the terrorists whose POVs make occasional appearances, though I still wouldn't go so far as to say that they've got real depth or have the development needed to bring emotion into the book.

Because, truly, it's emotion that's missing. I love a good action-thriller or action-horror novel, but especially when a story's end is predictable (and let's face it, most books in this genre have predictable ends, as does this one), it takes personal stakes and sympathetic, well-developed characters to make a reader engage with a story. Without well-developed characters, we at least need scenes that have enough nuance to carry emotion and build in personal stakes to engage readers. Here, I didn't come close to getting that. When main characters were in danger, I was just reading and waiting for the fight to end--Maberry never gave me reason to care who survived or how, and the fight scenes went on long enough that they overtook the book entirely. So, on top of lacking emotion, the narrative and plot were fairly one note, dashing from fight to fight. Meanwhile, when the author did attempt to bring in emotion, it ended up coming off as heavy-handed and or preachy simply because the characters were too stereotypical, and too flat, to feel real or engaging.

With a plot that had only the barest of twists, and few real-feeling characters, something more than strong fight scenes was needed to carry it through into being a successful read for me, and that just didn't happen.

There were moments of this book which I enjoyed, and I may actually recommend it for readers/writers who want examples of some great, clear, detailed fight scenes. But in terms of an emotionally engaging read that carried impact and kept me wanting to turn pages, this one fell flat for me, and I suspect I would have gotten more out of watching a movie even though this genre is right up my alley. I'm afraid I don't see myself picking up another Maberry book. show less

About 10 pages in, I started thinking of this book as “24 with zombies”. And I LOVED that premise! Joe Ledger is the ultimate Jack Bauer, with his tough, no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners approach to doing the right thing. Yet it’s also clear that he feels things deeply; he’s just able to compartmentalize those emotions and not let them interfere with doing his job. I was enjoying the ride and eager to see where this went.

And then, about a third of the way in, I encountered a scene I just couldn’t get past. [SPOILER ALERT] It’s probably because I’m a relatively new mom, and my soft, squishy heart just couldn’t handle the idea of dozens of children locked up in a cage and meant to be served to zombies for dinner. The scene show more were Joe and his team barge in to save the children - yet end up having to kill some of the kids who had been infected - was so heart-wrenching, grotesque and disturbing that I had to close the book. Unfortunately, that was it for me. I had to put this one in the “did not finish” pile. show less

I love the Joe Ledger Series! I actually read Dragon Factory before this book. As soon as I finished Dragon Factory, I had to read this book to find out more about Ledger. Joe Ledger is a very identifiable character because he isn’t some perfect super human guy. He is a regular guy, which just happens to have some very extensive military and combat training that helps him in every way. He is mentally fractured with multiple personalities, but with the help of his friend and counselor, he has learned how to control his mind and use his other personalities to his benefit.

What I love most about this book is that it is written in such a way that it could be realistic. It isn’t like most zombie novels that don’t explain how people show more became zombies or do a poor job of doing so. This isn’t some virus that came out of nowhere, a terrorist group MADE the virus to cause panic and terror in the world.

Joe just happened to be in the wrong place at the right time and was brought into the DMS, a top secret military group that answers to the president of the USA directly. The DMS are the ones that stop the world from ending day after day. There have been lots of books about top secret organizations, but those books don’t explain how everything came into play. Johnathan Mayberry does an excellent job of making his books sound like they could actually happen, and with the technology of 2012, some of the things really could happen. This is why I love the Joe Ledger series! show less

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 show more 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. show less