The screenwriter-turned-novelist wrote a book titled "Lockdown" in 2005 about a global pandemic. Fifteen years later, that's our reality due to coronavirus, which has so far infected more than 1 million people globally.

The book, which was rejected by publishers at the time for being too unrealistic, was finally published on Thursday.

Combining a devastating pandemic with a gripping murder mystery plot, Peter May’s high octane thriller is a chillingly prescient page-turner. Deploying all the clockwork pacing and knife-edge twists that we have come to expect from such an accomplished writer, Lockdown is a breathtakingly exciting slice of crime fiction.

They said that twenty-five percent of the population would catch the flu. Between seventy and eight percent of them would die. He had been directly exposed to it, and the odds weren't good.

A CITY IN QUARANTINE

London is in lockdown under martial law. A hospital is being urgently built by the river Thames to contain the thousands of victims of a flu-like epidemic. Construction is brought to a sudden halt when a leather holdall containing the bones of a child is unearthed from the rubble.