Review of Extinction Machine by Jonathan Maberry

It's been a while, but I'm back! I'll spare you the dullness of why I've been MIA since June and get right into the review. 

Extinction Machine, the fifth in Maberry's Joe Ledge series, does not fail in living up to

the previous four installments. We join up with Joe a few months after the events of Assassin's Code, and from the first pages we hit the ground running. 

Hungover and still recovering from a night of pleasure with a dangerous woman, Joe wakes up to a world where the whole government is after him for crimes he never committed (cuz, face it, if he had, he'd admit to them in a heartbeat). Joe, his Echo Team, and the very DMS is under attack from the government all the while strange things are flying in the skies and the word "UFO" is starting to be tossed around with a lot less skepticism than a few days before. 

A super secret group of three, one of whom is an industrial titan with a blank check from the US military complex, are sitting in the shadows pulling strings and picking up pieces of strange technologies that may or may not be from beyond the skies. As Joe and the Echo Team tries to stay ahead of the government's unrelenting push to dismantle the DMS, they delve deeper into the dark and slightly crazy arena of conspiracy theories, shadow governments, aliens, and a Black Book that apparently holds the key to the earth's survival. And that book is rumored to be in the hands of a woman who is the nation's foremost authority on conspiracy theories... and who may not be what she seems.

Maberry delivers again with his pitch-perfect blend of action, suspense, and enough testosterone that threatens to give the reader contact 'roid rage, and yet is able to sneak in some genuine emotion and depth to the characters to keep them from being one dimensional brutes. He also continues to make the extraordinary plausible, dare I say believable. In previous adventures Echo Team has encountered zombies, genetically modified soldiers, and vampires (as well as numerous other baddies in the short story collection that fit in between the main novels), now Maberry brings us aliens. Aliens. And yet, the concept of life beyond our planet doesn't seem campy or extrapolated within an inch of the allowances of fiction.

Again, I really can't recommend this series enough. I can't recommend Maberry enough. His Joe Ledger series is a delightfully hyper-masculine romp while his Rot & Ruin series is a heart-breaking, devastating view of death and survival at the end of the world, and the Dead of Night series is a brutal front row seat to the zombie apocalypse. I have yet to read his Pine Deep series, his very first trilogy, but I will track them down and devour them to continue my Maberry binge. 

All right, now what you've all be waiting for. My rating of this book. On my scale of 1 (literary hari kari) to 10 (literary orgasmic bliss), I give Extinction Machine a solid 8. Towards the end there was just one little hiccup (it'd be a spoiler, so I'm not going to explain) that kept it from being a 9. 

So, there you have it. Go forth and read!