The Dragon Factory

The Joe Ledger Novels, Book 2

By: Jonathan Maberry

Narrated by: Ray Porter

Length: 16 hrs and 14 mins

Publisher's summary

Ex-Baltimore cop turned special-ops shooter Joe Ledger is back in action.

In The Dragon Factory, Ledger and his team from the Department of Military Sciences square off against two separate groups of corrupt scientists. The beautiful but twisted Jakoby Twins are creating transgenic monsters and genetically enhanced mercenaries for sale to the highest bidder. Their father, who takes evil to an entirely new level, is using cutting-edge science to complete the Nazi master-race program.

Joe must elude the NSA who are gunning for him, fight his way past rogue Spetsnaz teams, and stop these madmen before the Extinction Clock runs out. And when the bloodbath claims one of his own, Joe Ledger declares total war on those people who would burn down the world in order to reshape it in their own dark image.

Take another thrill ride with Joe Ledger.

©2010 Jonathan Maberry (P)2011 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

“In Stoker-winner Maberry’s wild second Joe Ledger novel, Joe and his comrades from the Department of Military Science take on enough villains and their world-threatening plots to fill half a dozen ordinary thrillers.” ( Publishers Weekly)

Another Fantastic Joe Ledger escapade!

Thrilling! Imaginative! Real! AMAZING!
Perfectly performed and perfectly written. Love it! On to the next book in the series!

Adventuresome & Creative

I wasn't thrilled with various aspects of the ending but Maberry is forever entertaining and highly creative. Narrator is better than most at differing voices

CANNOT GET ENOUGH JOE LEDGER!

What did you love best about The Dragon Factory?

I loved the fact that it was typical Joe Ledger (Jonathon Mayberry) with many of the same characters as the first book. The action and intensity was the same as the first book as well. These books are my guilty pleasure! I also pressed my husband to listen and now he loves them too! Waiting for the next one.....

Who was your favorite character and why?

Of course Joe Ledger! He is crazy, brave, loyal, unpredictible and most of all funny.

Which character – as performed by Ray Porter – was your favorite?

See above

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

Yes and yes! You will forget you are listening to a book and become totally emersed in the story!

Any additional comments?

Love it, waiting for the next one

Kinda "Hero-ey" at times, but decent story

Overall it's a pretty good story, but it does get a bit "hero-ey" at times. I mean, you've got this police officer with a chip in his shoulder and a gendered disdain for authority as the main character. He has a short military career, but saw zero combat. His only real experience is he's pretty good at Jujitsu, and yet, in only a few hours if you read the previous book, he's leading a team into combat situations so skillfully you'd think he and his team have had months of highly specialized warfare training, because they're just as effective as SEAL Team 6 or Delta Operators who've been training and working together for years.

5 stars

loved it great read had me at the edge of my seat . great narration as well

Tons of Fun The Whole Way Through!

Only two books in and the Joe Ledger series has become a fast favorite of mine. Maberry effortlessly entwines a wide range of genres - military thriller, horror, science fiction, comic book action - to create an incredibly entertaining and compulsively listenable story.

In The Dragon Factory the extinction clock is ticking, counting down to global genocide. Cyrus Jakoby is a brilliant geneticist, his research building off the horrific medical tests conducted by Nazi scientists in World War II, and he has perfected the ultimate means to deliver the Final Solution and offer the white race complete domination over the Earth. It's up to Captain Joe Ledger and Echo Team to stop them, but time is running out and the Department of Military Sciences are caught off guard, stuck playing catch-up after inter-agency politics prompts the NSA to curtail their investigations.

There's a lot going on in The Dragon Factory and Maberry is an expert wrangler, maintaining almost complete control of the story's various plot threads and its multitude of characters. There's enough 24 and James Bond-style shenanigans and to keep listeners thoroughly engaged. The Jakoby family themselves are practically plucked right out of a Bond flick, with the incestuous albino assassin twins of Paris and Hecate conducting their own secret science experiments on a secluded island research base. Not every story thread gets wrapped up sufficiently (but hey, more fodder for book #3!), and some story elements simply fall by the wayside along the way to larger, more intriguing action sequences until they're briefly revisited and fairly neatly and quickly resolved in the book's epilogue, but taken as a whole The Dragon Factory is consistently good and completely captivating.

Published in 2010, The Dragon Factory feels less outlandish today than it may have at the start of this decade, as some of its more seemingly implausible aspects have been fulfilled in reality in only a handful of years. Take, for instance, the subject of white supremacists manipulating and controlling the White House and various government agencies, plotting to destroy the world by poisoning Earth's waters. Certainly this seemed more far-fetched in 2010, but here we are in 2018 with a band of white supremacists in the Oval Office, passing bills allowing our waters to be poisoned by mining waste and appointing the enemies of various government agencies to lead those very same agencies, like the EPA, and withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord, and placing immigrant children in concentration camps, and on and on and on. Sadly, the idea of virulently evil racists plotting to destroy the world from within America and through a network of highly-placed and influential government agents isn't quite the extraordinarily imaginative work of fiction it used to be.

Besides the white supremacist bad guys, Maberry injects a metric ton of cutting edge science and plausible-enough horrors stemming from transgenic experimentation to create superhuman animal hybrids to give Ledger and company a savagely violent run for their money. Using the concept of scientific terrorism to fuel a series also gives Maberry a hell of a lot of elasticity in redefining the shape and scope of various horror genre staples. In Patient Zero, Maberry wrote about a militarized unit's response to the zombie plague. Here, we get rogue government operators, assassins, and a bevy of massive, berserker monsters, alongside a spate of other genre concepts.

It's clear Maberry is having a ton of fun writing this stuff, and his enthusiasm is infectious. The Dragon Factory is awful lot of fun to listen to, and Ray Porter delivers another knock-out reading as he firmly settles into these characters and brings them to life (and in more than a few instances death as well). He manages to make each of the characters distinct, utilizing tonal ranges, inflections, and accents to differentiate Maberry's large cast, always making it clear which character is speaking at any given moment. His is a pitch perfect narration, hitting the highs of each action scene and the softer lows of emotional reflection and devastation. Porter further solidifies the simple fact that he is the definitive voice of the Joe Ledger series, and I can't imagine listeners wanting it any other way.

Patient Zero instantly hooked me, roping me into the thick of things and making me a Joe Ledger devotee. The Dragon Factory shows that this series most certainly has legs, and that it can run for miles. While the action is fast and fluid, this is a series that is more than just muscular brawn - it has a hell of a lot of smarts, too, both on and off the page.

Good listen.

very interesting. just hope like helll it never comes true. A Terrorist's dream. Excellent narrator.

Nurture , nature or choice?

Loves it. Joe just gets better and better. The enemies are real and evil. To scary for words. Makes you really look into those dark places to see if someone or something is looking back.

Good Book For The Buck

Good story...again...Ray Porter makes these books come alive. I will be purchasing the next book in the series.

Couldn't put this down

After reading Patient Zero, I had to pick up the next book in the Joe Ledger series. It is every bit as good as the original.