Jonathan Maberry’s Marvel Comics event Doomwar won me over so hard that I wanted to check out one of his novels. I opted for Patient Zero, the first Joe Ledger book (the second, The Dragon Factory, comes out this month), a military thriller about a zombie outbreak.
There is a part of me that enjoys the genre that Patient Zero belongs to a great deal. I tired of Tom Clancy when I was a teenager, but I’ve still got a yen for Greg Rucka’s excellent Atticus Kodiak books. Like Kodiak, Ledger’s a battle-hardened badass that’s smarter than he should be and possessed of a heart of gold and the hands of a killer. At the outset of the book, I worried that Ledger would be one of those action heroes who’s too perfect at everything, but that preconception vanishes pretty early on. That said, Ledger does end up taking down zombies barehanded; in fact, he does it a lot. He also solves the villains’ master plan about 3/4 of the way through the book. He’s like the Mara Jade of federal agents, honestly, and the question that you have to ask when approaching Patient Zero is ‘Am I okay with that?’
If you are, Patient Zero is a hell of a ride. It’s tense, it’s violent and it’s one of those reads that grabs you by the front of the shirt and won’t let go until you finish. It is not the best zombie fiction that’s dropped this decade – that’s still World War Z or Stephen King’s Cell – but it’s a solid action thriller and those are three words that you typically can’t string together. Definitely recommended. If you think it’s going to be in your wheelhouse, it probably is.
