Book Review: Kill Switch

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening...whenever it is you happen to be reading this.  I'm back for something a little different, this time with a book review.

If you've seen my past book reviews you know that Jonathan Maberry is one of, if not my favorite, author.  Be it his Joe Ledger series, which this book is part of, his Pine Deep, Benny Imura or other series...everything I've read of his has been fantastic!

From Amazon:

Terrorists have acquired a terrible new weapon that can crash the power grid and plunge America into a new dark age. A coordinated attack is planned to shut out all lights and emergency services to ten major cities. Planes will fall, hospitals will go dark, no help will come.

And in that terrible darkness, a dreadful plague will be released. If the lights go off, nothing can stop the bioweapon from killing millions.

At the same time, the intelligence services are being torn apart from within by a plague of betrayal, murder, and suicide. Even the Department of Military Sciences is stumbling in its response to the growing threat.

Time is running out, and Joe is being hunted by a terrifying new kind of assassin. A team of remote viewers have the ability to take over any person and turn ordinary citizens into killers. Where can you turn when there’s nobody left to trust?

Joe Ledger faces his deadliest challenge as friends and allies become enemies and all of the lights begin to go out…

How can you NOT want to read a book that has that description?  You have terrorist.  You have mysterious power outages.  You have betrayal.  You have the DMS.  You have remote viewers/dream walkers.  You have Joe F'N Ledger!  Sounds like a good time for everyone but those close to Joe and his team.

I sound like a fan boy here and I am to a certain extent.  From here on out there will be minor spoilers so you've been warned.

While not my favorite book of the series, that would probably be the first Patient Zero or Code Zero, this was good once it got going.

I thought it was a little slow at the beginning....mostly because they were adding new characters to the Maberry Universe so to speak.  In a quite a few of the previous books they built upon themselves so there wasn't as much background as there was here.  I guess I wanted more Joe fighting and Church being Church and what not.  Having just typed that I realize that is unfair of me to say but it is true, that is what I wanted so I struggled a bit getting into it which was odd.

The giant Albino penguins showed up and things started to pick up.  I realize now as i type this that things aren't as bad as I thought initially.  It really was a nice rollercoaster ride with slight little hills to start with, each new one slightly bigger till the end and the assault at the end the giant near 180 drop you want and dread.

The other thing that I disliked was that I knew the big bad guy in the book rather quickly.  It didn't take me long to realize who was pulling the strings of the puppets.  That isn't a huge problem for me personally because for me it is the journey not the end that matters for the most part (that is why I don't mind spoilers for most things) but from almost the first page the character was introduced I had a feeling like "I have a feeling that Joe is going to headbutt him in the face".  There were a few good red herrings in there and at one point I had convinced myself that it was someone different but briefly before I realized that didn't make sense but most of the time I was targeted on the one character.

The story was really good and interesting and I loved all the little inside references to the Maberry Universe like the droppage of the Lucifer 113 about midway through the book.  Then near the end with the Flash Forwards...I guess you'd call them...made me smile a lot.

Then throw in the includes of the alternate dimension ideas and cthulhu/Lovecraft stuff and I wa really dug the book.

Also I liked that it gave Bunny and Top a little more character than in some of the other books.   I'd really like to see them get their own short stories just to know more about these characters that I've read 8 books with and half a dozen or more short stories.

Overall another very good book by my close personal friend Jonathan Maberry!  You can pick it up online or most likely at your local bookstore however I'd go back and read all of the series first. Honestly if you want to pick up a fantastic book pick up Ghost Road Blues and read that trilogy before going into Ledger and the rest of his series.  They are all interwoven but I think Ghost Road Blues is a great intro to Maberry and not as military as the Ledger series.  Go go go!