The End of October by Lawrence Wright

Warning:  This eerily prescient thriller is not for the faint of heart.  Lawrence Wright, a staff writer for the New Yorker and author of several acclaimed works of non-fiction (including The Looming Tower), finished this novel before the onset of the Covid-19 crisis. It is the story of a novel virus first diagnosed in Indonesia, and of a CDC doctor with a checkered past who doggedly pursues the virus to its origin and rashly experiments with approaches to controlling it.  The Kongoli virus is closer to ebola in its symptoms and lethality but like covid in the ease with which it spreads.  The novel gives us graphic descriptions of massive suffering and death, and along the way provides much useful historical and biological information on pandemics.

The novel really gets scary when it delves into the international political machinations that surround the pandemic, including massive cyberwarfare,  shooting war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and growing tensions between the US and Russia, drawing on the international expertise of the author. Another subplot revolves around the history of the protagonist and others in developing both offensive and defensive biological warfare. Here too, the author provides extensive background. So, you can learn a lot from this novel that is relevant to our current situation while enjoying an intricate plot and colorful if one-dimensional characters. But mostly it will just scare your pants off. 

Mary Jo Bane