The first in a new Terry trilogy, ‘Contagion’ is a book that packs a punch.
Our story focuses firstly on a young girl, Callie, who went missing a year ago. She isn’t clear where she is – or even what she is – but she knows she is in an underground bunker, and that the people within its confines are experimenting with something.
Alongside Callie we are introduced to Shay, a teenage girl, who is struggling to fit into her new home in Scotland. She recognises a picture on a missing poster, and realises that she might well have been the last person to see this young girl alive. Of course, the girl she saw was Callie (it always helps for the stories to merge somewhere) and it helps that the brother desperately searching for Callie is not unattractive.
‘Contagion’ was a curious mix of genres – romance, thriller, dystopian – but I really liked the telling of the story through the two different viewpoints. It allowed us to do a little joining of the dots, and to get under the skin of the characters a little better.
As it becomes clear that there’s some form of contagion spreading through the country we join Shay and Callie in their attempts to work out who’s responsible, and how the country can fight back. I couldn’t have predicted some of the details that get dropped on us, but the writing about the fall-out of this spreading menace was horribly realistic.
My only real gripe with the novel was the fact that it ends with us still none the wiser about what has been happening. We have a couple of hints, but everything is left quite open. Frustrating, perhaps, but it has definitely left me desperate to get my hands on part two as soon as I can.
A huge thank-you to Teri Terry, publishers Hachette and NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read this prior to publication in mid-May 2017.