Quarantined by Joe McKinney

I honestly can't remember the last time I read a non-post-apocalyptic book.  I think it might have been last summer, but it may have been the summer before that.  It's not that I hate anything that doesn't involve the end of the world, far from it, but I just have so many PA books in my collection, with more being sent to me all the time, that I feel like I have to get through those first.

So when I checked my email the other day and found that the folks at Permuted Press had sent me a copy of Quarantined by Joe McKinney for review, it turned out to be kind of a surprise in two ways.

First of all, I was in-between books, and found myself in the mood for a plague story, something at the outbreak stage, and Quarantined sounded like exactly what I was looking for.

Quarantined is set in San Antonio in the months following the reappearance of a particular strain of the flu, a strain so virulent that the government takes the drastic action of surrounding the city with 190 miles of wall, sealing the surviving citizens in with the sick, and the dead.  It's when one of those dead doesn't look exactly right that Homicide Detective Lily Harris and her partner start an investigation that leads them to answers they were never expecting to find.

That leads to the second sort-of surprise; the book isn't really that post-apocalyptic. Yes, we're told that this deadly new flu is killing about 25,000 people per month, schools are closed and public gatherings are prohibited, and the population lives in constant fear of infection, rioting at the lack of basic supplies, believing they've been abandoned by the rest of their country.

But even so, all of that isn't so much the focus of the book as it is the backdrop; the story is really kind of a classic murder-mystery-leads-to-a-broader-conspiracy cop novel. The story is narrated in the first person by Detective Harris, and as I was reading I kept wondering if the author was a female police officer, because all of the details felt spot on, and it turns out that I was half right.

Joe is definitely a guy, but he is, in fact, a Homicide Detective with the San Antonio PD, so he was really able to fill his story with authentic details about the procedures involved in a murder investigation. And as he is himself a member of one of the agencies that are portrayed in the book, he has a good feel for the kinds of competition and infighting that goes on in the real world, and that when combined with a deadly super-flu could lead to the deaths of thousands.

So overall, although Quarantined didn't turn out to be exactly the kind of story I thought it was, that wasn't a negative at all.  It was cool to be able to read the kind of book that normal people read, but have it have just enough spice to keep a PA nerd like me entertained.  And Quarantined is definitely entertaining, whether you're looking for a read that includes the end of the world, or not.