What.A.Book! And such an appropriate read given the current climate in the world. Peter May first started to put together his ideas for a crime novel set amid Bird Flu/H5N1 in 2005. He researched it for many a significant period of time and eventually came up with Lockdown; a murder mystery and crime thriller set in the epicentre of a global pandemic killing millions. No publisher wanted to know; they said it was unrealistic and couldn’t ever happen. Until the smart cookies over at Riverrun decided May had stumbled on to something and his nov published while during the Covid-19 global pandemic which saw the majority of the world going in to lockdown as the international death toll rise higher and higher.
What a clever man Peter May is.
This book is set in London in the middle of a pandemic that’s wiping out millions across the world and emergency field hospitals and mortuaries are being built around the city (sound familiar?) and one night, a team of well paid and well PPE’d builders stumble across a smart, expensive looking hold-all in the ground containing the bones of a young child. And that is where the mystery starts.
Who is this child? Why are the remains stripped bare and stuffed in to a bag in the ground? What part of the puzzle does this unearthing fit in to? It’s up to D.I Jack MacNeil to head the investigation with forensic odontologist Amy and her team to discover the truth. In between times, there’s a ruthless and professional killer out in the city taking down anyone with information and is also forced to face every parents worst nightmare.
Lockdown was an exceedingly well written book and so very worth the time to read. It may feel a bit close to home for many people, and will do for a long time I’ve no doubt, but amidst all relative similarities it still is a fantastic good Murder mystery and crime thriller. The chapters are well paced and written from character perspectives and a good chunk of well explained science is thrown in to the mix the further in to the book you read. And because May did a lot of research in to the H5N1 strain it is really and truly interesting and really piqued my interest in to the mutation of generics and the spread of disease.
For me, this was a book I couldn’t put down and I’m most definitely looking forward to reading previous works of May once my 2020 TBR list has dwindled.
Morelli’s Reads 