Review of Quarantined
by Joe McKinney
I really enjoyed this book, despite the Dystopian framework
which I found very depressing. The condition of San Antonio during this time
period reminded me of what I’d read about Beirut. It’s terrifying that such a
situation is potentially very possible, as many novelists and short-story
writers have suggested in regard to plagues.
Author Joe McKinney has a special touch (witness, for
example, “Inheritance”) and here it applies to a more or less straightforward
murder mystery/police procedural. Detectives Lily Harris and her partner
Reginald “Chunk” Dempsey (you’ll figure out why the nickname early on) are on
Scar detail following the H2N2 influenza plague in San Antonio, a city
literally under quarantine: locked inside containing walls, perpetually short
of food and supplies, repeatedly looted and burned, with tens of thousands dead
and more dying every day. When a body turns up on a transport which is
unaccounted for, then proves to be one of the World Health Organisation
doctors, mystery upon mystery begins to unfold. Meanwhile, Lily feels the
pressure ever more, as she dreams of a “real life” for her five-year-old
daughter Connie and her husband Billy and herself.
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