“You are Detective Joseph Edwin Ledger, Baltimore Police, age thirty-two, unmarried.”

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…

Mr. Ledger, this is the new face of terrorism. A fierce, terrible bioweapon we don’t yet understand. It may take us months to even construct a viable research protocol, which means that time is completely against us. We think that your friend Javad in there was the bioterrorist approximation of a suicide bomber, that he was the ‘patient zero’ for an intended plague directed at the U.S. The blue case recovered at the scene was some kind of climate-controlled containment system, quite possibly to protect the other cell members from their own weapon. None of the others at the warehouse showed any signs of infection.” He paused. “We think we stopped them.”

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I should have really loved this book as it has two elements I crave: zombies and military. And a rugged hero called Joe Ledger (Imagine Reacher). Unfortunately this Joe Ledger is an absolute superhero – he can do anything, beat anyone and is excellent at every task you put in front of him. That makes him less relatable and more cartoonish than anything.

It seems to be formulaic: zombie apocalypse meets war on terror.

HIS NAME WAS El Mujahid, and it meant “fighter of the way of Allah.” Farm life had made him strong; his devotion to the Koran had given him focus. His love for the woman Amirah had given him purpose and very probably driven him mad, though from the profiles he’d paid to have done on this man, Sebastian Gault thought that the Fighter was already a bit twitchy before Amirah screwed his brains out.

That made Gault smile. More kingdoms have risen and collapsed, more causes fought and died for over sex-or its teasing promise-than for all the political ideologies and religious hatred that ever existed. And as far as Amirah went, Gault could certainly sympathize with the brutish El Mujahid.

Amirah was a ball-twisting vixen of truly historic dimensions, a true Guinevere-she could inspire great heroics, could stand by and support the rise of well-intentioned kingdoms, but at the same time she drove kings and champions to mad deeds.

And if you combine this with a terrorist who won’t just die you get yourself into a pickle. Unfortunately it’s not at the same epic levels as Contagious – Scott Sigler – Triangles #2 or Infected by Scott Sigler – Triangles #1

“Prions are neurodegenerative diseases called ‘transmissible spongiform encephalopathies,’ or TSEs,” he explained. “We still know very little about prion transmission and their pathogenesis. We do know that prions are proteins that have become folded and in that form act differently from normal proteins. These are strange little bastards they have no DNA and yet they’re capable of self-replication. Usually sporadic cases strike about one person per million, and at the moment these account for, say, about eighty-five percent of all TSE cases. Then you have familial cases, which account for ten percent of TSEs, and which are passed down through bloodlines in ways not yet understood, since inherited traits are genetic and, like I said, prions have no DNA. The remaining five percent are iatrogenic cases, which result from the accidental transmission of the causative agent via contaminated surgical equipment, or sometimes you see it occurring as a result of cornea or dura mater transplants, or in the administration of human-derived pituitary growth hormones. Still with me?”

“Clinging on by my fingernails. How come these prions are making monsters instead of just killing people?”

“It’s a design requirement of this new disease cluster. Prions produce a lethal decline of cognitive and motor function, and that allows the parasite-driven aggression to cruise past conscious control. Somebody took the prion and attached it to these parasites. Don’t even ask how because we don’t know yet.

Imagine if Dr. Evil had created some zombies, and Austin Powers was there to try to stop him.

The terrorism part of the book is overtaking the zombie narrative in many spots. I think what Jonathan Maberry wanted to do is write a military incursions book and just added the zombie element because he thought it would sell better. Instead the zombie fans got a borefest of military proportions and the military fans got prions 😀