Lockdown

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In 2005 when I was finding it impossible to secure a publisher for either The Blackhouse or my first Enzo book, Extraordinary People, I started researching a crime novel set against the backdrop of a bird flu pandemic.

Bird flu, or H5N1, was being predicted by scientists at the time as the likely next flu pandemic. In 1918, the Spanish Flu had killed anywhere between twenty and fifty million people worldwide, and bird flu — with a mortality rate of sixty per cent or higher — was being forecast to exceed that by a wide margin.

Having done a considerable amount of research into the Spanish Flu for Snakehead, one of my China Thrillers, it was a topic in which I was already well versed. But none of that prepared me for what my research on H5N1 would turn up, and the horrors that a bird flu pandemic could unleash on the world.

I began looking into the chaos it would inflict, and how society as we know it could rapidly start to disintegrate. I chose London as my setting, the epicentre of the pandemic, and a city in total lockdown. Against this background, the rendered bones of a murdered child are uncovered on a building site where workmen are feverishly constructing an emergency hospital. My detective, Jack MacNeil, is told to investigate, even as his own family is touched by the virus.

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