Dogs of Warby Jonathan MaberrySt. Martin's Griffin, 2017Jonathan Maberry's first novel featuring his redoubtable action hero Joe Ledger was Patient Zero, which had its US publication almost a decade ago and was and still is a grippingly enjoyable action-thriller with a techno-zombie plot line, a totally successful gene-splicing of thinking person's Michael Crichton and thinking person's Tom Clancy. And now, in 2017's Dogs of War, Joe Ledger – capable, sardonic, unflappable and yet still impressionable – is still jetting all over the world on behalf of the Department of Military Sciences, a clandestine black-ops governmental branch tackling menaces way out on the cutting edge of science and depravity. And Maberry, a long-time veteran of lavish, jumping storytelling, puts the reader inside that jet-setting right from the start of Dogs of War, in which even Ledger's catching-up exposition is exhausting:

I just got back from a dirty little piece of business in San Antonio and wasn't looking for more trouble. I'd gone down there as a gunslinger-on-loan from the DMS to intercept a bunch of cartel mules that were bringing in something nasty through a series of underground tunnels. Not drugs this time. No, these cats had containers filled with live mosquitoes carrying a very nasty new strain of the Zika virus. We tried to make it a clean arrest, but a couple of the bad guys decided to play it stupid rather than smart. That's something I've never understood. What's the worst that could happen to them if they surrendered? A few years in prison? Deportation? Better than being dead, which hurts more and lasts a long time.

The unsettling inventiveness on display there – human mules carrying weaponized mosquitoes – carries through all of the Joe Ledger novels. Maberry assures his readers that although the characters and scenarios he concocts are fictional, the science behind them is not … that somewhere, in some godforsaken laboratory, the horrors faced by Ledger and his teammates are all incubating as we speak. It gives the DMS novels an unmistakable added shiver of reading pleasure.In this particular novel, a terrorist has commandeered an army of mechanical drone dogs to deliver devastating weapons to targets all over the world (picked with a fiendish master plan in mind, of course – Maberry would be the first to admit he's not exactly writing Eugene Onegin here), and our heroes are scrambling right from the beginning to anticipate the next move in this wave of innovative aggression. And if the idea of weaponized dogs makes you wonder about the possibility of weaponized rabies, well, you're in just the right book, and this author has you in mind. His heroes are confronted with just that possibility in short order and must hurriedly piece together how the whole garish scenario might be playing out:

“The nanobots are somehow causing the disease. Or, maybe, regulating it somehow. From what I know of rabies, it doesn't hit this fast. That means it's either weaponized or regulated, or both. The original report from the girl's death at the Imperial said that she was screaming and coughing, and I saw that with Fojtik. Far as I know, coughing isn't a major rabies symptom, but it makes one hell of a delivery system for a weaponized disease. Our bad guys are somehow keeping the disease in check until they need it to go active, keeping it chambered like a bullet. Rudey said that nanites can deliver drugs, right? And that they can be used to regulate hormonal secretions. Well, maybe that's what we're seeing here. Is that possible? A bioweapon with a nanite control system?”

The rapid progression there, with characters talking themselves through the possibilities of every scenario, is typical of Maberry's dramatics, and the possibilities themselves hark all the way back to the beginnings of science fiction, which titillated its readers most often in the same way Maberry does, not by planting his flag in some far-distant future and dreaming up the tenth generation of contemporary science but by taking that contemporary science and tweaking it in small and terrifyingly plausible ways. Joe Ledger and his fellow heroes are constantly confronting the fruits of research and development that's happening in dark-light secret locations all around the world right now. And since so much of that science is real, the rest of us will just have to hope there are real-world counterparts of dauntless Joe Ledger, as handy dispensing one-liners as he is at shutting down killer nanites.