Dogs of War by Jonathan Maberry (Joe Ledger #9)

When I saw the book up for grabs at Netgalley, I jumped at the opportunity to read and review it. And I tried to read it, but soon I had to close the galley copy and wait until the book was published so I could buy it. I love all the Jonathan Maberry books, and Dogs of War didn’t disappoint.

This galley copy was sadly the worst I have ever gotten from Netgalley. I t wa s some thing lik th is through out the ent ire boo k which additionally included 200 empty pages with only a big black box in the middle of each page (yeah the book I got was 700 pages long, which in fact it isn’t). So I finally deleted the galley copy off my Kindle app. Thankfully by then, the book was only about a week or so away from publication.

Once Dogs of War came out, I grabbed a copy from Amazon and put everything aside and read it until late at night. It was probably 2 am when I finally finished the last chapter and went to sleep. And I had a very peaceful sleep because I knew that once again Joe Ledger had saved the day and the world from terrible people who wanted to burn our entire race from existence.

It is no big secret that Joe Ledger is one of my absolute favorite characters, lately even surpassing Jack Reacher, and that is saying something.

In the last few books, the Department of Military Sciences (DMS) has run out of luck and Joe Ledger’s team would meet with loss after loss all the way through. They were all really in a terrible place. By now everyone was not only terrified of their own shadows and strongly paranoid, but they were also doubting their own strengths and abilities.

And it seems that the new threat – AI robot dogs and deadly nanotechnology would be far away from giving them the break they so much needed. Not only that, but those two terrible technologies put together could just be the end of the world as we know it. And sure enough, there were forces at play that wanted exactly that very outcome.

So now Joe and his newly put together team (along with some of the old mates we know and love including Top and Bunny, Violin, Church, Rudy, and Bug), has to stop this new threat before it is too late. But how to stop a threat they are not even aware of?

Their supercomputer, MindReader, has been compromised, so it can’t detect patterns that could help them figure it all out … or has it?

And who is that echo in Joe’s phone that keeps giving him warning messages that auto-delete within seconds of them being read?

As usual, the team is faced with almost the impossible, running against time and enemies that keep coming back even after everyone thought they are dead. And one particular enemy is so feared that everyone in the team only ever murmurs hushed his name. And just when all team members are at their lowers, their biggest nemesis is back. Talk about a twist in the tale!

The book was a roller coaster, an extremely fast read, which once you started, you couldn’t put down. Jonathan Maberry has a knack for keeping your attention throughout and making you forget about RL (real life), heck even about eating lunch. You are fully immersed in Joe Ledger’s world and you’re running along with everyone to fight the evil guys and prevent the apocalypse.

The only thing I’m sad about? That I have to probably wait another year until the next installment comes out.