A Lovely Way to Burn

The opening chapter of this book sets the scene quite well for what is to come. Three unconnected shootings that set the stage for a London on the brink of disaster.
Stevie Flint, one time journalist and now shopping channel hostess finds herself caught up in most bizarre circumstances after she finds her boyfriend dead in his flat. Simon has left her a letter leaving her instructions about a package he has secreted in her loft space and telling her to trust no one but a named colleague.
Between finding Simon and being given his letter, Stevie has been ill, what she thought was the after effects of finding her lover's body, but in fact turns out to be an epidemic that has hit London. When Stevie goes in search of the colleague to whom she must hand the package, she discovers that he is dead from the virus that is being called 'the sweats' and that the package is very important to someone.
After she is attacked and her home broken into Stevie starts to investigate the package which contains a laptop; with the help of a few people she learns that the laptop contains information about a treatment her boyfriend and his colleagues were developing and it seems someone needs that information to stay hidden. Despite the 'sweats' killing people, including the one who help her, Stevie presses on with her investigation, determined to discover what it was Simon knew that he had to be killed for.
Louise Welsh writes a very atmospheric story, the sense of people panicking and dying in droves, of people trying to ignore what is happening and go about their business lends a sense of urgency to Stevie's mission. Although the idea of the sweats adds to the atmosphere it is probably not really necessary to the main story, which is the delving into Simon's death and the reasons behind it, although, maybe the sweats becomes more significant in the following books. However, it does add a bit more interest to the overall story.
The mystery of the laptop and what was on it did keep me intrigued and I hope that the sweat mystery does continue into the next book and we get to find out if Stevie can help find a cure, to me this was a more fascinating, truly dystopian subject and one which piqued my interest.
I thought it was quite a fast paced novel, with a sense of urgency, of time running out and it being of the essence that the laptop mystery was solved; although, thinking about it logically and as it was put in the book, Stevie was rather meddling whilst London was burning. Maybe the laptop stuff didn't matter because everyone was dying anyway but hey, suspend belief and go with it, it kept me guessing and urging her to hurry and I am looking forward to reading the next book in the Plaque series and finding out more about Stevie.

Thanks to Netgalley and Hatchette UK for the ARC of this book.