White Death, By Ken McClure

"If all the good people were clever / And all the clever people were good / The world would be nicer than ever / We thought that it is possibly could." So wrote Dame Elizabeth Wordsworth in the poem "Good and Clever". It is a fitting epigraph to White Death, the seventh thriller by Ken McClure to feature the ex-special forces medic Steven Dunbar, for the novel inverts the hopes of Wordsworth.

Would Wordsworth have been able to imagine a world in which governments are manufacturing vaccines to protect against terrorist attack using biological weapons? Sadly, the clever people are far from good, and their false machinations lead to devastating effect, while those with the best of intentions have their plans thwarted in some deft plot twists.

Times may have changed greatly since Wordsworth's era, but McClure shows the universality of human emotions – primarily that of fear. Fear courses through the narrative, unhinging the characters. It leaks through the government, corrupts the body politic and infects the nation. It is fear, too, tinged with curiosity, that keeps the reader turning the pages.