The threat of nuclear war is no longer scary. This is much worse. It’s invisible. It works quickly. And it’s coming…
The scourge has already infected and killed half the population in China and it is heading towards the UK. There is no time to escape. The British government sees no way out other than to distribute ‘Dignity Pills’ to its citizens: One last night with family or loved ones before going to sleep forever … together.
Because the contagion will kill you and the horrifying news footage shows that it will be better to go quietly.
Dr Haruto Ikeda, a Japanese scientist working at a Chinese research facility, wants to save the world. He has discovered a way to mutate a virus. Instead of making people sick, instead of causing death, it’s going to make them… nice. Instead of attacking the lungs, it will work into the brain and increase the host’s ability to feel and show compassion. It will make people kind.
But governments don’t want a population in agreement. They want conflict and outrage and fear. Reasonable people are harder to control. Ikeda’s quest is thoughtful and noble, and it just might work. Maybe humanity can be saved. Maybe it doesn’t have to be the end. But kindness may also be the biggest killer of all…
Will Carver is the international bestselling author of the January David series and the critically acclaimed, mind-blowingly original Detective Pace series, which includes Good Samaritans (2018), Nothing Important Happened Today (2019) and Hinton Hollow Death Trip (2020), all of which were ebook bestsellers and selected as books of the year in the mainstream international press.
Nothing Important Happened Today was longlisted for both the Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award 2020 and the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. Hinton Hollow Death Trip was longlisted for the Guardian’s Not the Booker Prize, and was followed by the literary thrillers, The Beresford, Psychopaths Anonymous, The Daves Next Door, Suicide Thursday and Upstairs at the Beresford.
Will spent his early years in Germany, but returned to the UK at age eleven, when his sporting career took off. He and his partner run their own fitness and nutrition company, and live in Reading with five children and a tortoise.
My thoughts: This was suitably weird and intense for a Will Carver book. There’s a genius scientist in Dr Ikeda, who just wants people to be a bit nicer to each other, and a complete idiot in the British Prime Minister who cares more about getting away with all his indiscretions than the country.
Dr Ikeda finds a secret file that suggests someone, but not the Chinese government, plans to release a deadly virus, Tau, on the world. His team have developed a vaccine for this virus, but millions will still die. So being a brilliant scientist and a genuinely nice person, he engineers an alternative – a virus that behaves a bit like the flu but leaves the sufferer kinder, nicer, and hopefully makes the world a bit better.
He secretly releases his virus, watching it slowly spread from China to the rest of the world. Sadly there are some deaths, but nowhere near what Tau would have done.
Unfortunately for the British people, one of the people who was involved in the plot to release that virus was the PM. He’s a nasty, slimy man (I imagine him with a thatch of blonde hair that needs a good brush for some reason) who can’t seem to stop cheating on his wife and getting caught.
Despite being the perfect person for Ikeda’s virus, he doesn’t contract it, instead pretending he has been hospitalised. He really is the worst.
Then a deadly cloud of some sort is seen over China, it appears to be acidic in nature, melting flesh from bone and leaving behind millions of dead. Now it’s on a collision course for the UK. So of course the government issue suicide pills to the populace and tell everyone to say goodbye. As the world watches, what will happen to us?
I’m a bit torn as having lived through the delights of Covid-19, lockdown and the horrors of 2020, I don’t really like any sort of pandemic fiction, and there’s a lot of it about. But I really like Carver’s darkly funny, macabre and peculiar books. There were certainly bits of this book I enjoyed, and even found very funny, but I just don’t know if we need more books about pandemics and corrupt politicians doing dodgy deals behind our backs.
It wasn’t my favourite Will Carver book but it was enjoyable and clever, and I did really like Dr Ikeda and his wife, two truly good souls in a Sisyphean struggle. If you read it, let me know what you think, I’d love some different perspectives.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
ramblingmads 