Synopsis
In the next novel in the Joe Ledger and Rogue Team International series by New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Maberry, the team faces new and old enemies alike as a bioengineered version of The Black Death surfaces.
Hundreds of years after the first waves of the bubonic plague swept through Europe, a new, more dangerous version threatens London. Joe Ledger’s old enemy the Red Empire—reborn as a far more powerful political and military group—has bioengineered a weaponized version of yersinia pestis—the bacteria responsible for The Black Death that killed tens of millions in the Middle Ages.
As Joe Ledger and Rogue Team International race against the clock to put a stop to the Red Empire’s plans, they’re sucked into the strange and mysterious past of the man called Mr. Church. Secrets come to light that make even his staunchest allies wonder who –and more precisely what—Church really is.
With whispers of an elixir vitae—or elixir of life—circling, Joe Ledger and Rogue Team International are facing the highest possible stakes in their work together yet. As the tension builds and the balance between life and death sways precariously, it seems like tragic losses among them might be inevitable.
Review
The radar of long-time Joe Ledger readers might ping at the mention of red in Red Empire, given our hero’s tumultuous past with The Red Order and their vampiric Red Knights. Since their debut way back in 2012’s Assassin’s Code, these blood sucking genetic whackadoos have grown into a series staple with multiple appearances along the way, including 2023’s Cave 13. Red Empire leans heavily on these earlier entries, but Jonathan Maberry does his best to make the convoluted history easy to digest. And hoo boy, does Red Empire ever have a lot of history behind it, so much so that Ledger even comments during a session of intelligence gathering that “Dan Brown just got a woody.”
Following an attack at a graveyard, Ledger has found himself targeted by the enigmatic and possibly demonic Nicodemus, just as a new threat rises from the ashes of the past. Some goofballs have been playing around with yersinia pestis, aka the bubonic plague, which swept through Europe in the Middle Ages. The Black Death was the deadliest pandemic in history, but modern science now offers the bad guys a chance to make this bacteria even more lethal as a genetically engineered, fast-acting, weaponized bioagent whose victims show signs of infection within hours and a painful death soon thereafter. When one of Rogue Team International’s own falls victim in London, the race is on to find a cure, the terrorists responsible, and to put an end to this latest threat before humanity itself goes extinct.
As with previous books, Maberry intercuts the present-day action with interludes flashing back to earlier periods that help give context to the unfolding events and to develop the bad guys and their motivations. Red Empire’s interludes just might be the farthest Maberry has stretched, reaching all the way back to the Crusades and the war between the Church, Islam, and The Red Order and their Knights, and the plague of the 1300s. Maberry weaves them all together in a complex tapestry of religious warfare, shadowy warriors, political infighting, and a conspiracy that carries through into the present.
There’s also the history of the many-aliased Mr. Church, a figure that’s almost as much of a riddle as his villainous counterpart Nicodemus. Maberry has been teasing this book as Mr. Church’s origin story for the last few years on his various social media accounts and he certainly delivers on that promise, adding yet more layers of complications to Ledger’s life and mental well-being. For his part, Ledger isn’t exactly on the most solid mental footing following the last couple books, forcing readers to question if he can survive this latest doomsday scenario both mentally and physically, given all of Church’s very many secrets and Nicodemus’s mind games.
Red Empire is a thick book in terms of both page count and plot. Coming in as the fifth entry in the Rogue Team International series and fifteenth overall Joe Ledger book, there’s a lot of unpack in here, although Maberry tries to make it accessible to new readers. For those who have been following along since Patient Zero, Red Empire offers the usual familiarities that have become staples of the series thus far. You’ve got your outsized, egomaniacal James Bond villain hellbent on world domination, genetically engineered super-bugs, and plenty of militaristic violence that’s blessedly free of American jingoism that would certainly feel false in our current political landscape. Although Ledger insists he’s apolitical, and Mr. Church’s war waves no flag other than humanity’s secular own, it’s hard not to see some incredibly relevant commentary in here about America in the age of Trump. It’s certainly a pleasure reading about Ledger wiping the floor with racist, Christofascist douchebags, although I wish more pages had been spent allowing his titanium-toothed attack-dog, Ghost, to maul the hell out of them along the way. There’s always the next book for that, I suppose. Hope, you see, it does spring eternal.
I think that with a series as long in the tooth as this one, fans may not be looking for originality as much as familiarity, and much of Red Empire certainly is familiar, at times feeling like a hodgepodge of prior books mashed together. Thankfully, it’s a comforting sort of familiarity, a pleasant bit of brain-candy, rather than a been there done that kind of bore. Besides, Empire’s climax might be among Maberry’s finest as Ledger does his best Die Hard impersonation as he and Havoc Team find themselves trapped in a towering office building thick with plague and terrorists, and the threats only get larger and wider in scale from there. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t completely on edge for the last third or so of this book, my hands gripping my e-reader tightly with tension and sweating bullets as I turned the pages and Maberry made me his emotional plaything. And, as with past Joe Ledger books, I finished feeling full and satisfied, and excited to see what comes next. Like I said, these books are the good kind of familiar, and I really can’t get enough of them.
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