The Bush League Critic

Zombies!! What can say? They do get my attention.

Joe Ledger is a Baltimore police detective who gets recruited by an enigmatic character (Mr. Church) to join a hush-hush, super-secret-squirrel government agency known as the Department of Military Sciences. The DMS is an all-star, "the best of the best of the best... SIR!", fast-response team recruited from other agencies (both government and civilian) that answers only to the President and is not restricted by annoying little regulations like the Constitution. You get the idea.

Enter the bad guys: Islamic extremists team up with a greedy, billionaire bastard to weaponize a plague (related to mad cow disease) that turns people into rage-filled, murderous zombies bent on chewing the thoat out of the Great Western Satan.

Enter the plot: Joe Ledger has to stop the terrorists, kill the zombies (walkers) and get the girl.

It's a fun read. I like action and I like zombies, so Maberry didn't have to do much else to get me to "like" this book. But he definitely needed to dig a little deeper to get me to "love" it. He didn't get there.

I don't know about anyone else, but I don't need a lot scientific mumbo-jumbo about prion diseases and folded proteins to make my zombies sound more plausible. I don't mind a little explanation for why there are zombies, just don't dwell on it. Plausibility isn't really the attraction for me... a head-munching, undead human is. So go ahead and tell me whether your zombies are the disease, the radiation mutation, or the demonic variety and let's move on, shall we?

Joe Ledger is a likeable enough badass and he has a lot of great zombie-killing scenes, but I couldn't get past the notion that his recruitment and the relationship between himself and the mysterious Mr. Church was modeled after the similar arrangement between Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith in Men in Black. That coupled with his decision to go with the pre-mixed, Islamic Terrorist bad-guys-in-a-can  made Maberry's whole effort seem more than a little "cookie cutter-ish".

The action sequences are legion and they're damn exciting, but a little heavy on the detail. Breaking down Ledger's reaction time in milliseconds and describing every minutiae of his fighting technique starts to sound more like a lesson in physics and kinesthesiology instead of the - "he grabbed the zombie's head and broke its neck" - kind of moment that I have to assume he was striving for. I think he must have been trying to help out the fight choreographer that Sony Pictures must choose for the ABC TV show I hear is in development.

The only other thing I have to mention is the blatant patriotic propaganda that is used in lieu of an actual denouement. The only thing that would have made it cheesier is if the book came with its own soundtrack that cued up Lee Greenwood's God Bless the USA while the characters made their exits.

So if you're looking for your typical "save the world and get the girl" type of action thriller - complete with bad guys who seem to be an afterthought to the hero's Kick Ass-ness, and a few too many unnecessary/transparent plot twists, then Patient Zero might be right up your alley.