Just Finished Reading:  Lockdown by Peter May (FP: 2020) [398pp] 

It was going to be Detective Inspector Jack MacNeil’s last day on the job. With a failing marriage and a young child he barely saw it was a sacrifice he was prepared to make – no matter how much the department needed him right now. Anyway, one more cop on the streets could hardly make a difference now that the world was seemingly coming to an end. No one really believed that, or at least no one was saying it, but it certainly felt that way. With a dusk to dawn curfew in place, armed soldiers on the checkpoints and millions around the world already dead it was hardly surprising that people thought it was all about to crash to the ground. The riots, looting and the mad parties where the young almost invited infection were clear evidence of that. But Jack still had a job to do – at least for another 24 hours.    Giving him the case though, that felt like an act of malice or maybe just desperation with so many other officers off sick. A bag had been found on the building site of a rapid hospital expansion. The bag contained the recently flensed skeleton of a young girl. It looked like an open and shut murder case and Jack was ordered to put it to bed ASAP. But this was his last case and he wanted to do it right – both for himself and the poor victim. The bones went to forensics and Jack started digging into the miniscule evidence his team had uncovered. As the hours passed and Jack followed what clues he had, a bored lab technician trapped at work because of the curfew ran some DNA tests on a small piece of flesh left on the victim's bones. No one was surprised that she’d had the flu and it had probably killed her. What was a surprise was the DNA sequence of the flu itself. Although it was a close cousin of the flu that was ravaging the world it was different enough to ring alarm bells – but not with the police. Someone else was keeping a close eye on Jacks investigation and they had no intention of letting him solve his last job, no matter the cost in lives. 

Naturally with what was happening around us and on the news every day I just had to pick up this book. A murder mystery set in London during a global pandemic – whilst IN a global pandemic. What could possibly be more ‘meta’ except actually living in London - which I don't? Apparently written some years before publication the story of London under lockdown was considered too far-fetched by the authors publishers before it happened for real. Naturally when the Covid outbreak hit the fan the book was rushed into publication. Apart from the fact that this was a very competent crime novel it was interesting to compare the fictional pandemic to the real one. The BIG difference being that the fictional pandemic was 40x as lethal as Covid-19 which, as you can imagine, made a huge difference to government responses – for example no ‘shoot to kill’ policy regarding breaches of quarantine in the real world (or at least not in London). It was interesting that in the fictional world they stopped using cash and stopped reading newspapers (because of the fear of virus transmission rather than the rejection of ‘fake news’!) and of course all kinds of public transport stopped. The empty roads and empty streets of the early real pandemic were well represented in the fake one.  

Those who have read my reviews before know that I’m a sucker for good characterisation and we definitely had some good examples here. The main character Jack was, I thought, very well drawn and I really liked him. My other favourite character was his wheelchair bound Hong Kong Chinese girlfriend (one very good reason why his marriage was failing!) who working in the forensics team and whose main join was in facial reconstruction. Two other characters stood out for me – the ‘assassin’ known as Pinkie who was a bit too hard to kill for my liking although his background and motivation I found interesting. For me the worst character, made more so by the fact that the story could have easily done without her, was a Canadian epidemiologist who didn’t seem to understand very basic virology. That was more than a little annoying.  

Overall though this was certainly an above average crime novel with a very contemporary background which was, generally, very well done. I think part of the fact that it felt so real and so credible (probably apart from the evil corporation hovering in the background) is the reality of Covid-19 but it would’ve still ‘worked’ without that fact going for it. I know there are still those who can’t face reading about such things for entertainment but if that doesn’t overly bother you this is a decent crime novel that’ll keep you entertained for a few days. Recommended.