Patient Zero
by Dr. Zombie on Nov.18, 2009, under Books
Monday, 1300 hours: Joe Ledger kills terrorist Javad Mustapha, aka Patient Zero, with two point-blank shots from his glock .45.
Wednesday, 0800 hours: Patient Zero rises from the dead…
When you have to kill the same terrorist twice in one week, there’s either something wrong with your world or something wrong with your skills…and there’s nothing wrong with Joe Ledger’s skills. Ledger, a Baltimore detective assigned to a counterterrorism task force, is recruited by the government to lead a new ultrasecret rapid-response group called the Department of Military Science (DMS) to help stop a group of terrorists from releasing a dreadful bioweapon that can turn ordinary people into zombies.
Author: Jonathan Maberry
Dr. Zombie’s Review:
Mayberry did an excellent job with this book. The hero Joe Ledger is a cop working on a terrorist task force when he stumbles on a terrorist plan to destroy the entire world.
All but forcefully recruited into an ultra-secret Department of Military Sciences, Joe Ledger must stop the terrorist plot before hell on earth is leashed via a engineered virus that turns the living into the walking dead.
One of the world’s richest men, Sebastian Gault, is funding the terrorist research into creating a bio-weapon that will turn the infected into zombies. The terrorist will get a weapon while he will get a disease that his company alone has the cure. Unfortunately, the terrorist have other plans.
This book was fast paced, and I hardly ever put it down. Part Spy Novel and Part horror novel, just made for a great book. I hope to see more in this series and I hope to see more zombies from Maberry in other books. This is a must read for Zombie fans.
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- Fire Extinguisher vs. Shotgun Butt
- Monster Island
- World War Z
- Zombie Haiku
- The Zombie Survival Guide
- Monster Nation
- Zombie Book Review: Death Troopers

June 23rd, 2010 on 6:01 am
So glad you enjoyed PATIEN ZERO. The second Joe Ledger novel is now out: THE DRAGON FACTORY, in which Joe and the DMS encounter transgenic mercenary soldiers, mythological animals, a cloned slave race, and a plot for global ethnic cleansing.
In 2011, Joe Ledger will return in THE KING OF PLAGUES, hunting a secret society who are using modern versions of the Ten Plagues of Egypt as terrorist weapons to crash world economies. That book will be out next March.
Then in 2012 Joe and Echo Team square off against genetically engineered vampires and werewolves in THE OTHERS; and there will be at least one more book after that.
There are also two free Joe Ledger short stories available online: “COUNTDOWN” is a prequel to PATIENT ZERO (http://us.macmillan.com/CMS400/uploadedFiles/COUNTDOWN_free.pdf) and “DEEP, DARK”, which takes place just before the second book, THE DRAGON FACTORY. Here’s the link: http://jonathanmaberry.com/download-the-free-joe-ledger-story-deep-dark
A third Joe Ledger short story, “ZERO TOLERANCE” will appear in the anthology THE LIVING DEAD 2 edited by John Joseph Adams for Night Shade Books. That story is a direct sequel to PATIENT ZERO, and the anthology will be out in September.
June 29th, 2010 on 12:20 pm
We look forward to reading the further adventures of Joe Ledger and we will definitely keep our eye out for the short story in The Living Dead 2.
Thanks for sharing the upcoming projects with us.