LESLEY KELLY
Pandemic Crime Novels
There are a lot of people out there who couldn't bear to read a pandemic novel at the moment. But if you are the kind of person who has been racing through Robin Cook's Contagion, hooked on Peter May's Lockdown, or even leafed through the grandaddy of pandemic novels, Camus's The Plague, you might be interested in some of the lesser known pandemic and medical thrillers, all of them with a distinctly crime fiction theme!
The Health of Strangers series by Lesley Kelly
The North Edinburgh Health Enforcement Team will hunt you down if you miss your monthly Health Check. Dealing with murder, politics and intrigue, the HET's biggest problem is keeping themselves alive. The series is set in a parallel Edinburgh where people are trying to survive a killer virus - it was fiction when it was written!
The Waiting Rooms by Eve Smith
Not strictly a pandemic novel, more a near future medical apocalypse...
Swinging from South Africa to England: one woman’s hunt for her birth mother in an all-too-believable near future in which an antibiotic crisis has decimated the population. A prescient, thrilling debut.
Plague by Julie Anderson
There are many ways to die. Plague is just one of them.
Work on a London tube line is halted by the discovery of an ancient plague pit and, within it, a very recent corpse. A day later another body is found, killed in the same way, also in a plague pit. This victim is linked to the Palace of Westminster, where rumours swirl around the Prime Minister and his rivals.
As the number of deaths climbs, the media stokes fear. Government assurances are disbelieved. Everyone feels threatened. This has to be resolved and fast.
The Quickening by Rhiannon Ward
England, 1925. Louisa Drew lost her husband in the First World War and her six-year-old twin sons in the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918. Newly re-married and seven months pregnant, Louisa is asked by her employer to travel to Clewer Hall in Sussex to photograph the contents of the house for auction. Desperate for money after falling on hard times, she accepts the commission.
The Plague Times Trilogy by Louise Welsh
It doesn't look like murder in a city full of death.
A pandemic called 'The Sweats' is sweeping the globe. London is a city in crisis. Hospitals begin to fill with the dead and dying, but Stevie Flint is convinced that the sudden death of her boyfriend Dr Simon Sharkey was not from natural causes.