Patient Zero

Baltimore Detective Joe Ledger thinks that the two bullets he fired into the back of the terrorist Java Mustapha during a warehouse raid should have done the trick. But when three government agents show up, escort him to a nondescript building and lock him in a room with the recently re-animated Mustapha, he discovers that he couldn't be further from the truth. Thanks to the results of his second meeting with Mustapha -- actually, a test to see if has the "right stuff" -- Ledger is recruited by the mysterious Mr. Church to join a new, ultrasecret organization known as the Department of Military Science, or DMS. Mustapha, now known as Patient Zero, is the first inkling of a new line of bioterrorism, one that can turn everyday people into show more zombies, and it's up to Ledger and the DMS to stop the threat before someone releases it in the U.S.

When I first began to read, I inwardly groaned at the quick portrait of Ledger -- and even his therapist Dr. Rudy Sanchez -- as mens' men, rugged, handsome and always on the prowl for a good-looking woman. Images of those semi-cheesy Sci-Fi Channel movies popped into my head, but they quickly disappeared. After Ledger and Sanchez come face to face with the new threat, something changes, a very subtle shift in both their attitudes. Each still has a bit of that he-man swagger, but it's rational, tempered by what they've seen, by what they know could possibly happen. And I found my self liking them, wanting them to succeed, cheering and fretting with each run-in with the zombies.

On the other side of the character coin, the villains in Patient Zero also started out as the typical "businessman out to make a buck no matter what" and Middle Eastern extremists. Sebastian Gault runs the world's largest pharmaceutical manufacturing operation, and together with the terrorist El Mujahid and his mad-scientist wife Amirah, he plans on introducing the new infection into the U.S., but for purely monetary reasons. But just like Ledger and Sanchez, just when I want to hate him, he realizes what El Mujahid and Amirah are really up to and takes action. Totally unexpected and a great twist, in my opinion.

The timeframe of the story runs only a few weeks, and Maberry creates a real-time feel with the pacing. Very little time elapses between Ledger's second run-in with Patient Zero and his first major zombie fight. The characters don't get a rest and neither does the reader! I was glued to the action, not being able to put the book down because I needed to know what was going to happen next. (I actually read the last 300 pages within a few hours last Saturday, in one sitting.) As for the "battle" scenes, the detailed settings, the cautious approach by Ledger and his team, the zombies themselves being ordinary people, the violent and bloody fights -- just amazing. And I will say, for a horror novel, Patient Zero does a nice job of adding a realistic political thriller into the mix. show less

A former police detective and should-have-been special forces member Joe Ledger can't help himself but be absorbed into the latest super secret anti-terrorist agency. His skills as a martial arts expert and guilty ruthlessness are ideal skills to lead a small unit into a zombie infested plot to punish the infidels of the world. Other than that we have the usual roles: two other-wordly beautiful scientists, a figure head for the secret agency who's more composed under pressure than the statue of liberty and various other cast members you can fill in by grabbing random James Bond or Bourne characters.

That's pretty much all you need to know. At least if you're only interested steam-reading through the novel to get through the action parts, show more which is what I did. It's not my kind of book as you may have guessed from the previous paragraph. I did find myself highly entertained by a number of interesting aspects of this book. First of all you learn more about the author than Joe Ledger. Second, the explanation of how scientists can create zombies almost sounds plausible. The science even feels just as well thought through as any Michael Crichton construction. Finally, the entire book appears to have been written either as either inspired by first person shooters or targeted to become one. My bet is on the latter.

Regarding the zombie science you'll have to read it yourself because Maberry does a much better job of describing how it works than I could. Maberry himself is very visible throughout the pages. A clear fascination with hand to hand combat can be gleaned from almost every page, but at the same time a sense of shame appears to bleed through. Joe Ledger must be a fairly skinny guy for someone who we learn should have been Black Ops, since he loses his lunch fairly frequently. Having the main character reflect on what he has just done is an admirable goal and a very refreshing one, but it reads as an apology for indulging in writing about detailed killings instead of an honest balancing of remorse vs aggression.

As you read the novel you may experience a sense of deja-vu: where have I seen such events before? The plot structure of the story follows the most common setup of a first person shooter. First there is the introduction and training of the main character (you) in which you learn how to deal with the specially created monsters for your enjoyment. Then you're given a taste of the true legion of badasses that are sure to come soon. After this the big battle with the small fry occurs in which you slay dozens or hundreds, it doesn't really matter how many, baddies, after which you're allowed into the arena for the final showdown with the boss character.

After the first chapter you can already predict in a fair amount of detail how the rest of the book is going to develop. I did keep on reading because I was very interested in finding out more about the writer. An interesting read and worth while if you're a fan of the 'I am Legend' genre. show less

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

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Title: Patient Zero
Series: Joe Ledger #1
Editor: Jonathan Maberry
Rating: 4 of 5 Stars
Genre: Action/Adventure
Pages: 346
Words: 141.5K

Synopsis:

From Theledgerfiles.fandom.com

The book opens with Detective Joe Ledger attempting to enjoy a day at Ocean City Beach in Maryland, when he is approached by FBI agents and escorted to an undisclosed location. He reluctantly goes with them knowing he could easily escape if he had to, wondering if this is about the show more warehouse raid his task force had done the week before. They bring him to see a man named Mr. Church who wants him to audition for a position in his new organization, an ultra-secret counter-terrorism group called the Department of Military Science (DMS). He does so by subduing a man he had killed the week before at the warehouse, Javad Mustapha, by breaking his jaw and snapping his neck. Zombies, Joes’ world turns upside down. Church explains the possibility of other terrorist cells with potential zombies out there, and says he may be in touch in the future for help. Joe is returned to his car and advised not to try and look for any information on Church or the DMS, because he won’t find any.

Joe picks up his friend and psychiatrist Dr. Rudy Sanchez and explains to him everything that has happened. Rudy believes him, and they both spend days trying to find information regarding Church, the DMS, and prion diseases causing zombies to no avail. Even the police report on the warehouse raid is gone. Rudy then vanishes, taken by the DMS to the warehouse, and Joe heads out to rescue him. He is welcomed inside, taken to Mr. Church, sees Rudy with a gun to his head, and is forced to agree to join the DMS in their fight on terror. The drama is explained away by their dire situation, and Rudy joins up with the DMS as well. Joe is then put into a room with five other candidates to decide who the leader of the new team will be, big and tough looking guys from Marines, Force Recon, and the like. Joe knocks them all into submission within seconds, and takes the title of Captain of Echo Team, with the men he just pummeled as his crew.

Afterwards Joe is introduced to Major Grace Courtland a former SAS member on semi-permanent load to the DMS. She and Mr. Church explain to him what the DMS is, their tool MindReader, and the disaster at St. Michaels, where their first zombie outbreak got out of control. We learn this is generation three of the pathogen. With how terrible things went down, Echo team is called to move out immediately, before they can even start their first bit of training, to hit the newly found site of another cell with potential zombies. Echo Team witnesses horror at the meatpacking plant, scientists pushing walkers towards screaming children, and in a moment of rage, Echo team runs in guns blazing to take down the enemy and save as many kids as they can. Having to put down a turned child, Joe and Echo are even more enraged, and demand to hit the second site ASAP.

They are forced to rest for few hours first; it’s been a long and traumatizing day. Joe meets the DMS scientists and Dr. Hu, who explains the science of this disease happening. Suddenly, the zombies being held for study by the DMS get out of the lab and attack the staff. Joe, Bunny, and Top respond first on site to put down the threat with minimal losses. Church starts an investigation with team leaders about the incident. With the knowledge of at least one traitor in the facility and a bitten soldier, Echo team is sent out to hit the second site immediately.

At the crab plant, Echo team is on a look-and-see mission only, with Alpha and Bravo on back-up. Information is the most important thing they need now. But after their successful infiltration, they stumble into what turns out to be a huge ambush. Hundreds of walkers are set loose on the team, communication jammed, explosions kill many of their back-up, Ollie and Skip go missing, and they fight to their last bullet and ounce of energy to stay alive. Gus Dietrich and the cavalry save them in their last surviving moments. They manage to keep a prisoner alive for a short time and get information out of him concerning the terrorist responsible El Mujahid and the disease Seif al Din; they also realize the possibility of creating a cure for something this frightening bringing in trillions of dollars to the research and distribution industry, and wonder if someone there might have a hand in this.

Joe brings in Det. Jerry Spencer, a former Baltimore Police Crime Scene Inspector that worked with Joe in the past, to join the DMS and learn what he can from the horrible scene at the crab plant; He is the best at what ae does. Joe questions Skip Tyler and Oliver Brown about them going missing under suspicious causes as there is a mole in the DMS. They learn their ambush at the plant was all a set-up to make them think their new information was legit. And that a pharmaceutical company, or something in the industry, must be behind this terrorist group, in it for the money.

Joe has a hunch on an impending attack, a possibility from the intel they’ve found. He requests that Echo Team, along with Grace and Rudy, be put inside the Secret Service detail that is on guard at the Liberty Bell Re-Dedication ceremony on the Fourth of July. They interview Linden Brierly, regional director of the secret service, and Robert Howell Lee director of special operations for the FBI/Homeland joint command, to get info on the event and the men they sent to the DMS when Church was first building it up, searching for their traitor.

Joe was correct; this was the event El Mujahid was using to unleash his pathogen onto the western world. Disguised, Mujahid unleashes generation 10 of the pathogen into the crowd, the most virulent of the strain so far. Joe and Top Sims chase him down, but he has infected himself with generation 12 of the strain. Immortal, able to keep his consciousness and higher brain functions. Top battles with Skip, who turned out to be the traitor, while Joe takes down El Mujahid in an intense close-quarters fight that ends with Joe taking off Mujahids’ head with the blade of a table top paper cutter. Bunny, Gus, Grace, and Rudy saved as many lives as they could at the main event, many were lost and turned, but the entire outbreak was contained.

The director from Homeland, Robert Howell Lee, attempted to kill himself, being a mole for the terrorist group, but was revived and questioned by Church. Lee admitted everything the DMS didn’t know, the involvement of the famous Sebastian Gault , hero of the world for all his Red Cross funding and million dollar medical research company. He was funding El Mujahid and his wife Amirah to just threaten the USA with this horrible disease so they would make billions developing the cure, but was betrayed when they wanted to actually release the plague to kill the western world. Sebastian and his assistant Toys destroy El Mujahids’ bunker in Afghanistan where the disease was being developed and kill Amirah who has also taken generation 12 of the pathogen. They are last seen taking a Red Cross boat away, with fake identities, covered in bandages and burns.

Church returns to the DMS base called the Hanger in Floyd Bennett Field, and leaves Joe and Grace in charge of the Warehouse in Baltimore.

My Thoughts:

Talk about the perfect book at the perfect time. I wanted some serious kick butt macho man action and boy did I get it in spades here! If this book had been a hamburger, it would have been Wendy's Triple Cheeseburger.

Joe gets recruited into the super secret DMS (Department of Military Science) where they stop super threats before they happen. They are blacker than Al Sharpton and have all the power and the toys needed to do their job. Joe is immediately thrown into action stopping a zombie plague from being released. On top of that, there appears to be a traitor within the ranks of the DMS that he needs to worry about too. Then they find out the zombie plague is set to hit the United States on July 4th and decimate the nation. Joe can't let that happen and he kicks butt to stop it.

While Ledger is Action Man in the flesh, the side characters play just as big a role and made this book what it was. Mr Church, the mysterious head of the DMS is appropriately mysterious and scary all at the same time. Ledger has a head shrink who gets caught up in the whirlpool and sucked into the DMS. There's a British chick that plays the love interest and honestly, she and Ledger hooked up WAAAAYYY to fast. Slow it down buddy or she's going to end up as plot fodder. There's some scientists and other Action Men to round out the Good Guys. The bad guys were deliciously bad. No grey namby pamby pansy wimpos. These were the geniune article of Bad Guy. They were smart, devious and dedicated to the death of all America. THAT is how you write a bad guy!

For some reason I was expecting there to be a supernatural element to the series but at first blush it would appear to be a Super Science Goes Wrong kind of thing more than any supernatural forces forcing their way into our dimension. I'm ok with that. Big Enemies and Big Guns means Big Action.

★★★★☆ 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

This book moves at a crazy pace from the first chapter: balls-to-the-wall action, take-no-prisoners zombie gore with an amusing and sympathetic narrator. It was truly scary, unlike some of the more standard zombie fare, because it was believable. Maberry knows his military and police stuff, and there were some scenes that straight out gave me nightmares. Good stuff.

Maberry might be using the recent zombie filled horror genre to his advantage, however Patient Zero is a mile ahead of the competition. This smart and feisty military techno-thriller introduces a fictional black-ops type agency and their involvement in a terrorist plot. The terrorists in question have sourced a formula to create flesh-feeding killers and although zombies are becoming stale, Maberry's entertaining and well researched approach offers likeable characters, well choreographed action scenes and an invigorating approach to zombiedom. Coupled with the current terrorism awareness in the world Patient Zero is a cracking read.