Unstoppable

August 14, 2017
The 20 stories in this uneven thriller anthology set in Stoker Award–winner Maberry’s alternate universe all feature Joe Ledger, a former Baltimore cop who now defends America from threats both natural and supernatural for the Department of Military Sciences. The series’s premise, as stated in movie producer Tony Eldridge’s foreword, is certainly promising: “Drop John McClane from Die Hard into an episode of Fringe and you’ve entered the world of Joe Ledger.” Jon McGoran’s “Strange Harvest” and Javier Grillo-Marxuach’s “No Business at All,” both clever tales, live up to this challenge. Unfortunately, other entries make the suspension of disbelief an uphill struggle, such as James Ray Tuck’s “White Flame on a Sunday,” in which Ledger and his occult bounty hunter friend, Deacon Chalk, encounter a sigil to summon a Sumerian “elephantine god who will one day destroy the world by stampeding across it, using its immensity to press humanity into a sweet wine for its consumption.” Other contributors include such notable genre authors as Steve Alten, Scott Sigler, Christopher Golden, and Tim Lebbon.

October 15, 2017

Maberry's series protagonist, ex-Baltimore cop Joe Ledger, is now a senior field agent for the Department of Military Sciences, a shadowy government agency that fights terrorists who threaten America with cutting-edge technology, along with a range of monsters, zombies, robots, and aliens. With this volume, Maberry and Schmidt recruited some of the best writers in speculative fiction to spin 20 tales that revolve around Ledger and his team. A revenge-bent woman confronts Ledger in "Target Acquired" by Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon. In "Vacation," an excerpt from Scott Sigler's novel Nocturnal, San Francisco cops Pookie Chang and Bryan Clauser give carte blanche to Ledger during a murder investigation. VERDICT Ledger fans will find plenty to enjoy in this anthology as their enigmatic hero goes from playing a central role to becoming a side character to finding himself in intriguing meet-ups with the contributors' own series protagonists.--KC

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