When you start a book with a short first chapter, you'd better make it memorable. For Patient Zero author Jonathan Maberry introduces us to our hero, Joe Ledger, with two sentences:
"When you have to kill the same terrorist twice in one week, then there's either something wrong with your skills or something wrong with your world.
And there's nothing wrong with my skills."
From that point forward, I was hooked. Joe Ledger is a detective in Baltimore who's spent the last year and a half involved in a task force comprised of various police departments and Federal agencies. The task force was assigned to keep tabs on a group of terrorists that may have been attempting to smuggle in some type of bioweapon. After 9/11, this is a scary, yet possible scenario I'm sure has been played out by many law enforcement personnel around the country.
When he gets picked up by a group of men with FBI credentials and taken to see a guy simply known as "Mr. Church," he enters a whole different world. And there things start to get weird for Ledger. The trip turns out to be an interview for a federal agency that doesn't exist -- the Department of Military Sciences or DMS for short -- and in order to get the job, he has to subdue a prisoner.
However, the prisoner turns out to be one of the terrorists he killed during a warehouse raid by the task force he was on. And though he was very dead (Ledger made sure) at the warehouse, this suspected terrorist was still trying to kill Ledger in an interview room - zombie style. That's right - reanimated flesh intent on eating you and infecting you so you too become a member of the zombie army...
Maberry manages to do something I didn't think was actually possible. He gave zombies a plausible reason for existing. And then he gives the secret to a group of terrorists intent on jihad.
In case you're wondering, Ledger isn't alone when he fights the zombies and terrorists. Mr. Church has an entire team of scientists and a small army working for him, including Major Grace Courtland of the British SAS, whom we become acquainted with.
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