Patient Zero

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. And that's both a good, and a bad thing. It's good because he's a Baltimore detective that has just been secretly recruited by the government to lead a new taskforce created to deal with the problems that Homeland Security can't handle. This rapid response group is called the Department of Military Sciences or the DMS for short. It's bad because his first mission is to help stop a group of terrorists from releasing a dreadful bio-weapon that can turn ordinary people into zombies. The fate of the world hangs in the balance....

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Publishers Weekly

While raiding a terrorist cell at the start of this exciting thriller from Stoker-winner Maberry (Dead Man's Song), Baltimore PD Det. Joe Ledger shoots two .45 slugs into Javad Mustapha, killing him very dead. Four days later, while trying out for a secret government antiterrorist unit, Joe has to kill Javad all over again. It appears the terrorists have figured out a way to make zombies, and they're about to turn the legions of the undead loose on the world. Terrorist El Mujahid and his brilliant scientist wife, Amirah, who created the zombies, are working with villainous international businessman Sebastian Gault. That Sebastian and Amirah are having wild sex in the lab shows that loyalties within the group of conspirators aren't all they should be. Joe leads a team of elite fighters against the zombies, a job he performs with spectacular skill. Plenty of man-to-zombie combat, a team traitor and a doomsday scenario add up to a fast and furious read. (Mar.)

Jonathan Maberry is the multiple Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Ghost Road Blues (Pinnacle Books, 2006), first of a trilogy of thrillers with a supernatural bite. He is a professional writer and writing teacher and since 1979 has sold more than 1100 articles, seventeen nonfiction books, six novels, as well as short stories, poetry, song lyrics, video scripts, and two plays. In 2004, Jonathan was inducted into the International Martial Arts Hall of Fame largely because of his extensive writings in that field.