I'm going to admit that I’d never heard of Jonathan Maberry until I read this book. Is that bad? Maybe. Since I read Patient Zero I've read another 2 Jonathan Maberry novels and I plan to read more. Maberry is a multiple Bram Stoker Award-winning author. His early books dealt mainly with martial arts and self defense, but Maberry departed from those topics and went on to write a number of books on the paranormal, including Patient Zero: A Joe Ledger Novel.

Maberry has started writing a series that follows Joe Ledger as he and his team fight terrorism. The first book of the series, Patient Zero (2009), tells the story of how Joe, a Baltimore cop, gets recruited as a lead agent for the rapid response team (called Team Echo) for the Department of Military Sciences or the DMS for short. His first mission is to stop a group of terrorists from releasing a deadly bio-weapon that can turn ordinary people into zombies. Now I have you interested! The fate of the world hangs in the balance as Joe and his team become enveloped in an action-packed, zombie nightmare.

Team Echo at the DMS is comprised of agents that run the full gamut of character types. They are all fairly well-developed characters with distinct backgrounds that range from different branches of the military to the CIA. Basically, they are all kick-ass killing machines with their own personal baggage that makes them unique. They work well together as a team but of course their personalities clash from time to time.

The terrorists are headed up by Sebastian Gault, a crazy-ass pharmaceutical gazillionaire, and his strange second-hand-man known to us only as Toys. These two fund and oversee most of the operation. But, they don't work alone. El Mujahid, a Muslim terrorist, and Amirah, El Mujahid’s wife perform most of the work. It is Amirah who runs the lab that creates and further develops the virus. While the two groups are supposed allies, theirs is a strained relationship marred by hidden agendas and betrayals.

The zombies are represented as fairly standard modern zombies. Seemingly filled with rage, out to bite and destroy. Much like a lot of modern zombies, they appear to attack only for the sake of attacking and spreading the disease as opposed to feeding and meeting some kind of brains-quota. The action sequences are thrilling and scary. Maberry does an amazing job of holding you in suspense and coaxing you into wondering what will happen next. I found it hard to put this book down, even at 2am!

The thought of bio-weapons that could create a similar epidemic is terrifying and depending on your school of thought, a real possibility in today's world. Patient Zero does an amazing job of taking the zombie genre to a whole new, more realistic and modern level by melding it with a truly real-world nightmare scenario of bio-terrorism. I highly recommend this book as an easy but intriguing read for any zombie genre fan.