Dust to Dust By Ken McClure

I’ve never been a fan of this sort of thriller genre.  You know, the ‘ex-special-forces guy saves the day aided only by his brains, a ruler and a microwave oven’ sort of book.  But this absolutely sold me.

It’s got action, emotion, excitement, it’s relevant to our time, and it’s got science.  Think CSI-history with conspiracy theories.  McClure ingeniously takes the only subject every kid wanted to learn in history - the Black Death; adds the only thing we all talked about in politics - the Iraq war, and strings it all together with the threat of the one thing newspapers love to scare us about - the populace’s total annihilation by an incurable virus.

Dust to Dust begins with a scientist’s dream to discover proof for what he believes is the true cause of the Black Death - an extinct virus.  Luckily for him a mystery agency have discovered the possible location of some conveniently preserved plague victims.  Their only condition to funding his research is that he performs slightly suspect tests on a young Scottish man, one suspiciously akin to a lately deceased soldier.  Enter McClure’s hero, medical hard-man Steven Dunbar.

My only real criticism for this book, other than its occasionally forced dialogue within longer passages of discourse, is that McClure shifts from a very likeable character at the beginning to the new, ‘Jack-from-24-meets-house’ protagonist.   However, it would perhaps be different for someone who had followed the series, and from this perspective McClure does an excellent job by developing all characters, rather than doing the easy thing of using one stock character whose only purpose in the novel is to be saved by his hero.

As a medical research scientist, McClure is able to use medical science believably and creatively.  He then makes it easy to understand for those without a science background without being patronising or boring for those who do.  McClure also manages to pull in various streams of plot in an almost filmic way, making it fast and exciting.

Dust To Dust is very much worth reading, using all of the best areas of its genre whilst avoiding most of its clichés.

RM

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