Lockdown

Description

Peter May’s vision of a society in lockdown is chillingly accurate. 

In 2005, scientists had been predicting the possibility of a major pandemic. At that time they believed it would be the H5N1 virus, or Avian Flu.  H5N1 was less contagious than Covid-19, but many times more dangerous, with a mortality rate of anything between 60 and 80%.  May undertook research into the detailed pandemic planning done by both the British and Americans in the early 2000s.  He used that research to build the scenario which forms the background and basis of Lockdown, a thriller involving a detective with London’s Metropolitan police. 

Jack McNeil is tasked with investigating the murder of a child, in a city where the prime minister has just died, a curfew is in place, temporary hospitals are being erected, corpses are being taken for cremation en masse, and martial law is the only way to keep social order. Sinister forces are tracking his every move, prepared to kill again to conceal the truth. Which one will stop him first – the virus or the killers?

But fifteen years ago, publishers could not imagine such a scenario except in science fiction.  It was not deemed a setting for a crime thriller. 

The reality today? London is a city in lockdown. Emergency services are buckling under the strain of skyrocketing infections. The death toll is mounting. The Prime Minister has caught the virus. And it’s only going to get worse.

Jack McNeil is an ordinary detective trying to do his job in an extraordinary world that every reader today will recognise.