Review: Patient Zero by Jonathan Maberry

My wonderful review-machine colleague, Chuck McKenzie, reviewed this novel some time back, and one of his closing comments was that he hoped it gained the distribution in Australia it deserved (Maberry’s Pine Deep trilogy was barely marketed down under, even with award nominations and wins). I was thankful to receive a promising review copy from Gollancz – in trade paperback – and it certainly looks ready to be distributed across Australia (23 April 2009), albeit an altered cover. I for one am thankful, because this certainly is a deserving novel.

For those who haven’t read Chuck’s review, let me remind you of the premise. The story is a mixture of thriller and horror (with some sci-fi and noir thrown in). Protagonist Joe Ledger, a Baltimore Police Department Detective, is part of a team who raids a warehouse, during which he guns down a man who tried to bite him. Shortly after, he is covertly whisked away to a secret base, where he meets a man codenamed Church. Mr Church offers Ledger a position in an even more secret team, the Department of Military Sciences (DMS), if he can handcuff or restrain a man in the next room. Only, that man is the same one Ledger gunned down in the warehouse, and he’s even more of a vicious, snapping monster. Yes, what we’d call a zombie. The DMS hopes the man is a Patient Zero, the first and hopefully last of a scientific experiment gone horribly wrong. But as Ledger leads a team into another warehouse, connected to a terrorist group the DMS has been watching, it soon becomes clear that an equally secret organisation has been experimenting with a radical prion strain for a long time. They have been rounding up men, women and children and turning them into the zombie-like creatures, all to test the release of a plague that could wipe out America, and indeed the world.

That’s a very simple explanation – I cannot do the story justice, because amongst the main plot is a spider-web of twists. Amongst Ledger’s team of five it soon becomes clear there is a plant/mole/spy – and you’ll be guessing for most of the novel just who that is (as does Ledger). It is also quite unclear who Mr Church is, and how he has so much pulling power with all the authorities. And it seems the terrorists linked to the plague have different ideas on how to use it. Throw in a subtle touch of intimacy between Ledger and another agent, not to mention that the team never gets a break in physical combat, and you have one hell of an interesting story.

The best part, for me, besides the never-ending onslaught of zombies and traps for Ledger’s team, was the realism in the combat scenes. Author Jonathan Maberry is himself a black belt in two disciplines – 8th level black belt in jujutsu and 5th level black belt in kenjutsu. That makes for some wonderful descriptions of hand-to-hand combat, which Ledger must rely on a lot (after he’s created a heaping pile of zombies with his gun). This may be a touch too much for some readers, but the descriptions are very accurate and gave me a deeper picture of what was happening. I also loved the main character – Joe is a smart-mouthed yet lovable guy who just won’t say die (although it was strange to have him in the first person perspective and the rest in third). The only writing decision that took some time to get used to was the use of larger sentences with connectives: ‘this happened and he did this and then they did that…’ Because it’s largely a thriller, short, sharp sentences would have worked better in some areas, but that is just my opinion – it does help to drag the tension out so you’re almost as breathless as Ledger.

The chapters move along at a breakneck speed – you’ll hardly want to put the book down. All I can add is support this writer in Australia – there are more Ledger novels planned for the future, and I’d love nothing more than to see them promoted here.