A Lethal Mutation

The most dangerous contagion may be the one that spreads when the truth is buried. A Ugandan surgeon arrives in London with what feels like a routine winter cold. Days later she’s dead and Britain is facing a mutant haemorrhagic virus with a nightmare twist: it’s airborne. In Cambridge, pharmacologist Ben Lucas is pulled into the search for a treatment when a drug he has helped develop, MB874, shows promise in reducing the chance of infection. Although the drug provides good protection against the mutant strain of the Marburg virus, MB874 comes with a risk so toxic it could devastate lives long after the virus has gone. With lockdowns tightening, riots flaring, and bodies mounting, the question becomes brutally simple: whether to save millions of lives now if it means gambling with millions more later. A Lethal Mutation is a near-future medical thriller about the impossible moral dilemmas faced by those in power, and the reality of what science can deliver and what it can’t.