This thriller would be eerie right now anyway, but it’s even eerier given that May wrote it 15 years ago. His virus is far deadlier than Covid-19, but his portrait of a city under siege from a silent enemy, his explanations for the spread of the disease – “we’ve created the perfect incubators for breeding and passing on infection, in the buses and planes and underground trains we travel on. We were a human disaster waiting to happen” – are scarily prescient. May, who is currently “hunkered down at home in France, forbidden to leave my house except in exceptional circumstances”, as he writes in a new foreword to the book, is a classy crime writer and Lockdown is both prophetic and unnerving.
