Joe Ledger
Joe Ledger is the protagonist of a series of military/Horror/Speculative Fiction thrillers written by Jonathan Maberry.
Troubled Baltimore Police Officer Joseph Ledger is man with an Army background and a painful past. After helping foil a major crime in his home city, he is approached by a man known only as Mr. Church, who offers him the opportunity to head up his own team on a special task force branch of the Department of Homeland Security.
Joe, intrigued, joins up and gets his best friend and therapist Rudy involved as well. He hand picks from the recruits a number of men, including Bradley Sims and Harvey Rabbit. They are then sent out to stop terrorist cells from doing things that could literally end the world. But these terrorist cells take terror to a new level, often using Mad Science to duplicate monsters usually only ever conceived in supernatural fiction and folklore.
The series currently consists of:
- Novels
- Patient Zero
- The Dragon Factory
- The King of Plagues
- The Assassin's Code
- Short Stories
- Countdown
- Material Witness
- Deep, Dark
The chronological order of the series goes: Patient Zero, then Material Witness, Deep, Dark, The Dragon Factory, Countdown, The King of Plagues, The Assassin's Code.
Tropes used in Joe Ledger include:
- Action Girl: Any female who becomes a Love Interest for Joe once he's an adult: Grace, Violin.
- Almost Kiss: Played with. Joe stops himself from kissing Violin, and she becomes offended thinking that her half-vampire nature has disgusted him, knowing now what he knows about the full vampire race. But he stopped her because of two reasons: he'd eaten garlic due to having to face the full vampires and thus had terrible bad breath, and also as a half-vampire, he was afraid he would cause her harm through the same allergic reaction to it. When she found out the real reason, she laughed.
- Amazon Brigade: The Mothers of The Fallen and their daughters.
- Anyone Can Die: among many others, Grace.
- Arbitrary Skepticism: Joe admits that although he has fought zombies, mutants, and clones, that he has a really, really difficult time embracing the idea that vampires are real.
- Asskicking Equals Authority: Joe gets his authority by kicking the ass of his team when they are arguing who should be in charge.
- Badass: Everyone in the DMS, bonus points to Joe, Mr. Church, Sergeant Dietrich, Bunny and Top Sims
- Badass Boast: When you have to kill the same terrorist twice in one week there's either something wrong with your world or something wrong with your skills... and there's nothing wrong with my skills.
- Badass in Charge: Church and Joe
- Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: Stoker and several other authors were either working for the Red Order or had been intentionally misdirected by the vampires.
- Big Damn Heroes: Echo Team has one for Joe just about every book.
- Big Friendly Dog: Ghost is one to Echo Team, and only to anyone else Joe has identified as a friend by command phrase.
- Big No: Echo Team in "Assassin's Code".
- Body Horror: a lot of the things encountered in The Dragon Factory and "Deep, Dark".
- Born Lucky: Joe Ledger, though Aunt Sallie comments it does not extend to those under his command.
- Brother-Sister Incest: the twins from The Dragon Factory.
- Bruiser with a Soft Center: Bunny.
- Bug Buzz: Noises heard by Joe, Top and Bunny in "Deep, Dark", as a result of the work going on there.
- Cloning Blues: 82 after he discovered that he is a clone of Josef Mengele
- Code Name: Used by the DMS teams and by Arklight's operatives.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: Sebastian Gault
- Crossover: With the Pine Deep Trilogy by the Same Author
- Cute Bruiser: Lydia.
- Downer Ending: Played straight and subverted in different books.
- Evil-Detecting Dog: Joe's dog Ghost subverts the trope. He's just a military trained German Shephard trained for bomb detection, body detection, and attack. Some of the enemies act like he really is such a dog.
- Face Heel Turn: Hugo Vox.
- Five-Man Band: Echo Team -- though the lineup changes because of death by attrition.
- The Hero - Ledger
- The Lancer - Top
- The Big Guy - Bunny
- The Chick - changes due to death by attrition, but is Grace early in the series, Lydia later, though they are The Chick in name only.
- Gratuitous Spanish: Lydia. She tends to call Ledger "Gaucho", which is Spanish for his codename, "Cowboy".
- Half-Human Hybrid: Various things in The Dragon Factory.
- Holograms: Mr. Church and Aunt Sallie have access to technology that produces them -- within limits.
- I Call It "Vera": In "Material Witness," Bunny mentions naming his new gun "Missy".
- I Have Many Names: Mr. Church aka The Deacon, aka St. Germain. And those are only a few of the aliases mentioned for him, and only the few Joe himself knows personally.
- "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: In "Deep, Dark" Joe uses this on James Collins.
- Inexplicably Identical Individuals: Aunt Sallie looks exactly like Whoopi Goldberg.
- It Got Worse: A Corrupt Corporate Executive and Terrorists with Zombies in the First Book ends with Vampires with Nuclear Bombs
- Jerkass: Doctor Hu.
- Lady of War: Grace, Lilith, Violin.
- Mad Science: Lots and lots of it, in every book.
- Mad Scientist's Beautiful Daughter: One of the twins from The Dragon Factory
- Men Don't Cry: Subverted. Even though Joe and his team are all Badasses, none of them flinches from shedding tears when the situation calls for it.
- The Mole Skip Tyler in Patient Zero
- More Teeth Than the Osmond Family: The Upierczi family.
- Morally-Ambiguous Doctorate: While Dr. Hu is not actually evil, he views the end of the world plots as a chance to play with a new toy
- Our Monsters Are Different
- Our Ghosts Are Different
- Our Vampires Are Different
- Vampire Bites Suck: These vampires are of the "tear the throat out" variety.
- Weaksauce Weakness: These vampires are allergic to garlic, but not in the usual way; Echo Team of course uses the weakness creatively.
- Our Zombies Are Different: They have Mad Cow Disease
- Papa Wolf: Ledger has a few traits of it, but Deacon really embodies the trope at one point in the series.
- Playful Hacker: Jerome Williams, the DMS's computer genius, aka Bug.
- Power Trio: Joe, Top and Bunny.
- Punny Name: Dr. Hu.
- The Quiet One: John Smith.
- Rape as Drama: Ledger's Backstory.
- The breeding program used by the Red Knights in "Assassin's Code".
- Red Eyes With Hellish Pupils: The vampires.
- Red Herring Mole: Poor Ollie Brown, but as a former CIA assassin he did look the part
- Sanity Slippage: Joe tends to suffer a little bit of it in each book, but comes back because he has Rudy to turn to.
- Shout-Out: There are a number of pop culture references, as Joe is an aficionado of same.
- Split Personality: Joe Ledger. However, he has worked it out in such a way that the three personalities tend to work together, like a committee. The Civilian keeps him sane, The Cop Works things out and when the Warrior gets let out, some one is going to get Hurt.
- Take That: A dig at Twilight in "Assassin's Code".
- That Man Is Dead: Alexander Chismer/Toys as of "Assassin' Code"
- There Are No Therapists: Averted Rudy is a psychiatrist/psychologist who helps Joe over the death of his girlfiend Helen, and later, Grace.
- Trademark Favorite Food: Mr. Church loves Vanilla Wafers, Joe Likes Oreos
- Unfortunate Name: Harvey Rabbit -- naturally everybody calls him Bunny.
- Where Does He Get All Those Wonderful Toys?: Mr. Church plays with the trope. He is forever pulling amazing technological gadgets out for the DMS and Joe's team in particular. When asked, all he ever says is "I have a friend in the industry."
- Zombie Apocalypse: Planned but narrowly averted by Joe and team.