Juggernaut
Set in the Iraq desert in 2005, this genre blender should appeal to fans of zombie stories and military fiction. Its story is simple. A group of mercenaries is searching for tons of gold rumored to have been hidden by Saddam Hussein; they find the gold, but they also find the undead remnants of a disastrous top-secret military project, one that involves a highly unusual virus. Baker throws in some extra concerns for the mercenaries to deal with: some of the group turn traitor, stranding the remainder without transportation, and one of the group is attacked by one of the infected, prompting worries that he will turn into one of the undead. At its heart, though, this is a military thriller about a small group of soldiers fighting an unseen, unknown enemy. The story would have worked as well if the enemy had been, say, soldiers from an enemy country rather than zombies. As in TV’s The Walking Dead, the point here is the characters and the way they interact; the undead are kept mostly in the background, a constant shadowy threat. Very nicely done. --David Pitt