"...reads like a superior collaboration between Dan Brown and Michael Crichton."
--The Guardian

Now an Amazon Charts and Wall Street Journal bestseller.

From the bestselling author of Winter World, Departure, and The Atlantis Gene comes a groundbreaking sci-fi thriller that takes you inside the CDC and WHO response to a global outbreak. It's an eye-opening journey that will change everything you think you know about pandemics--and how to survive one. The product of over two years of research, Pandemic is filled with real science and history--and more than enough twists to keep you up late into the night, promising, "just one more chapter."

Selected Praise for A.G. Riddle

"I finished the book fast because I just couldn't wait..."
--WIRED GeekDad on Departure

"Riddle makes an effort to keep the focus on how his characters react to each other (including to their future selves) rather than to the technological marvels that reshaped their world."
--Publisher's Weekly on Departure

"Well-constructed and tightly-wound as a fine Swiss watch--Departure has non-stop action, an engaging plot and, of course, wheels within wheels."
--Diana Gabaldon, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Outlander on Departure

An Extended Look at Pandemic

A hundred miles north of Alaska, a US Coast Guard vessel discovers a sunken submarine at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. It has no national identification and doesn't match the records of any known vessel. Deep within, researchers find evidence of a scientific experiment that will rewrite our basic understanding of the human race.

In Atlanta, Dr. Peyton Shaw is awakened by the phone call she has dreaded for years. As the CDC's leading epidemiologist, she's among the first responders to outbreaks around the world. It's a lonely and dangerous job, but it's her life--and she's good at it. This time, she may have met her match.

In Kenya, an Ebola-like pathogen has infected two Americans. One lies at death's door. With the clock ticking, Peyton assembles her team and joins personnel from the Kenyan Ministry of Health and the WHO. What they find in the remote village is beyond their worst fears. As she traces the origin of the pathogen, Peyton begins to believe that there is more to this outbreak--that it may be merely the opening act in a conspiracy with far reaching consequences.

In Berlin, Desmond Hughes awakens in a hotel room with no memory of how he got there or who he is. On the floor, he finds a dead security guard from an international pharmaceutical company. His only clue leads him to Peyton Shaw--a woman who seems to know him, but refuses to tell him how. With the police searching the city for him, Desmond desperately tries to piece together what happened to him. To his shock and horror, he learns that he may be involved in causing the outbreak--and could hold the only key to stopping it.

As the pathogen spreads around the world, Peyton and Desmond race to unravel the conspiracy behind the pandemic--and uncover secrets some want to keep buried. With time running out, they face an unimaginable decision.

NOTE: this novel is available as an eBook on Kindle Fire and Kindle eReader, as an Audible audiobook, and in print (paperback and hardcover). It's also in Kindle Unlimited where subscribers can borrow it for free.

Length: 722 pages	Word Wise: Enabled	Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
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Book Description

Book one in an addictive new sci-fi thriller series, The Extinction Files, from the the worldwide bestselling author of The Atlantis Gene. --This text refers to the audioCD edition.

Review

'There's more than enough drama, action, peril and adrenaline packed into this novel to make it unputdownable ... Much of its complex story feels potentially real and believable' For Winter Nights. 'A complex, multi-stranded narrative spanning 700 pages that reads like a superior collaboration between Dan Brown and Michael Crichton' Guardian. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Format: Kindle Edition
File Size: 2341 KB
Print Length: 722 pages
Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
Publisher: Legion Books (5 April 2017)
Sold by: Amazon Australia Services, Inc.
Language: English
ASIN: B06Y382BHS
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Word Wise: Enabled
Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
Customer Reviews: 1,855 customer ratings
Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,708 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #4 in Science Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #13 in Genetic Engineering Science Fiction
- #12 in Techno-Thrillers (Kindle Store)

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5 star		61%
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2 star		6%
1 star		4%

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Not sure why I bothered finishing it

Reviewed in Australia on 28 December 2018

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This book actually became increasingly boring the longer it went on. Far from a suspenseful story that keeps you guessing, it was riddled with clichés about surprise villains and shallow love affairs. The descriptions regarding Peyton's relationships and her emotional investments were weak and unconvincing. The characters were hard to connect with, and the way each person was practically the prodigy in their field just made them less interesting. This book was more about the military style political warfare relationships than it was about millions of people experiencing illness and death as part of a bigger plan.

I won't be reading the next one in the series. Peyton is a waif.

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Olivia Watts

A gripping, intelligent glimpse at an all to possible thriller

Reviewed in Australia on 22 October 2017

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It takes a lot to get a five star rating out of me. To earn one, the book needs to have been crafted by an author at the peak of their craft with an original and credible plot, characters who quickly take on a reality and humanity and the overall ability to sweep you away into the journey so that you just must keep reading.

Mr Riddle's recent books have been good and ever improving. With "Departure" he moved for me from very good author to gifted status. With "Pandemic" however, he joins the ranks of the truly great and leaves such luminaries as Dan Brown, Clive Cussler and Matthew Reilly floundering in his wake.

I have not been paid for this review nor was I supplied a reader's copy by the Publisher. I paid my own good money out of the limited funds my Disability Pension provides me and regret not one cent spent. It was a real pleasure to see Riddle breathe such new and exciting brilliance to a trope which has been oft visited , usually in a far less polished manner it must be said, and I have no hesitation in speaking of his novel in the same glowing terms I would normally reserve for Michael Crichton's "The Andromeda Strain"; one of my all time favourites of the trope.

Full credit should be given as well to the narrator of the Audible version; he brings both story and characters to life perfectly, managing to even create acceptable Australian accents - a very touchy point for we Aussies who usually don't know whether to laugh or cry at the way our speech is mangled.

Although my eyesight is so poor I cannot read it, I have already purchased the second volume of the Extinction Files, "Genome" in the hope that it's Audible version will soon be available ...... and with prayers that the same narrator is available.

Bravo Mr Riddle, and thank you from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia!

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Sneaky 4 star read

Reviewed in Australia on 7 July 2019

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On a whim I thought I’d try not only a new author, but a new genre. I haven’t branched out into reading action/conspiracy theory/espionage, etc., novels that don’t have a fantasy element involved. However I read the sample on a whim, and was quite taken with not only the story, but with the characters.

And, as you can see, I bought the Kindle version and spent a lazy day devouring it. Great plot, fast paced with some interesting twists and turns, plus a fascinating cast of characters that I can’t wait to catch up with in the next book.

4 stars

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Loyall

This book started out fantastic. It had the right elements of mystery

Reviewed in Australia on 3 August 2017

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This book started out fantastic. It had the right elements of mystery, suspense, and overall hit the notes that I love in a thriller. I was glued to the pages up until the halfway point, which is when the book spends more time as a flashback memory sequence than an actual story. This kept up until about the 80% mark and I was ready to throw in the towel long before this. The author also took it from thriller into a romance story, where the plot points didn't even make sense.

Honestly, I wondered if this was even written on Earth anymore. The characters may as well have had magical powers.

I'll give this author another try, but pandemic won't get another look from me.

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Surprisingly engaging.

Reviewed in Australia on 22 January 2018

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For a hefty door-stopper of a book (at just under 700 pages) this had a surprising amount of momentum. The characters were all well developed, and the mystery maintained my curiosity through the entire reading. Riddle's technique of using unlocked memories to reveal back story was very clever.

My one criticism is that the plot became a little hysterical towards the end, moving into the realm of cliche and improbability...but given the length of the novel, I think Riddle did well to maintain as much control as he did. I'll certainly read the next in the series and hope that it continues the well-paced credibility and detail of the majority of this first book.

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Birgit

It sounded better from reading the back cover,

Reviewed in Australia on 3 January 2018

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The first part of this book was engaging with information about viruses and how they are treated by the CDC. As the story unfolded it presented so many flaws and impossible scenarios. I know it was supposed to be fiction but flying from the Shetland Islands to Australia in one leg is pretty much impossible. The characters were interesting and well developed but it was difficult to take the story seriously.

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robbie

Terrifically Interesting

Reviewed in Australia on 10 July 2017

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I hope my review encourages you to buy this book. I loved it, had to make myself stop reading it and actually get out of the house. Then spent all yesterday afternoon reading it by the fire. First book I have read by this author and what an introduction. Hanging out for Book 2.

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Carlien

Interesting story

Reviewed in Australia on 5 July 2017

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A very enjoyable book. A lot of research has gone into writing this story. It can be a little slow as things were explained but I appreciated the explanations.
I found the characters on the whole likeable and mainly understandable, although not sure about one complete turn around near the end was believable.
I am looking forward to and have preordered book 2.

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Riccohb

Wooden, laboured, ridiculous

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 August 2017

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This book starts promisingly, but then quickly passes through ridiculous on the way to becoming laughable. The plot is nonsensical, and relies heavily on unbelievable coincidences to try to tease out as many twists and surprises as possible. However, after about the second reveal (almost all of which revolve around the same idea) I just found myself rolling my eyes and thinking, 'oh, come on.' I got the impression the author wanted to write a book with lots of twists and turns. Unfortunately, Pandemic only really has one twist, but it just repeats it endlessly with different characters, until you can see it coming a mile off.

A note on the research. Many of the reviews so far praise the research that went into writing the book. I can't quibble with the idea that it was researched. That said, there are two types of bad research in a novel. The first is where the research isn't done or the facts are wrong. The other, which the author is guilty of in spades in this book, is showing the reader how proud he is of all his research by shoe-horning every single fact he could find out about every single subject into the text. So in Pandemic, when a character walks into a park, we're told that at 520 acres it's Berlin's oldest park and one of the biggest urban parks in Germany. This has no bearing on anything in the story or any of the characters. When a character approaches the Brandenburg Gate we get told "The gate had been constructed in the 1780s by Frederick William II, the king of Prussia..." And then we get a couple of pages of the sort of dry history that you'd read in a second rate guidebook. When a bio-weapons lab crops up in the story things get even lazier and the author just lifts information from the lab's Wikipedia page. Which makes the book read just like a Wikipedia page. Research should be transparent. The research in Pandemic just distracts you from the story.

The dialog is at times so wooden you could get splinters from it. After watching an emotive video of his dead son, one character says "Yes, it was indeed bittersweet to watch. Thank you for showing us the video." It reminded my of the old Billy the Fish comic strip where the football team's plane explodes in mid-air and as the team manager is plummeting to the earth, he says "Well that certainly puts the cat amongst the pigeons as far as this week's team selection is concerned."

I have a rule that I don't award a book 1 star if I managed to finish it. I finished Pandemic, so it gets 2 stars. It would have got 3 if an editor had been employed to cut 200 pages out of it and it avoided all the pointless digressions.

71 people found this helpful

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Clive

NEARLY FIVE STARS

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 16 January 2018

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By the time I was 70% of the way through this book, I was set on giving it a full five stars, so it's a shame that it all went slightly awry towards the end.

First, the good stuff. Well, the depth and level of research absolutely shines through and, in a book as centered on science as this is, that's important. The scenes of dealing with a horrendous global pandemic ring with authenticity and make for gripping reading. The literary device of having a main character with no memory is intriguing at first but gets a bit wearing later on. The pace of the story is fast enough to carry the reader along and make "just one more page" an easy decision.

So what went wrong? Well, by the middle of the book, the reader is keeping track of a growing crowd of main and secondary characters, all of whom are connected in one way or another. But as the book reaches its last 20%, the connections between these characters and their part in this global story begins to not only become apparent but also gets more and more unlikely, requiring a real suspension of belief. There's also a not unusual Americanisation that creeps in, by which I mean that there is a sense that everything in the world is either done by Americans or is because of America. So every single individual involved in this global plot, spanning decades, is, in some way American.

There is one glitch that really made me smile. When the Kevin Costner film 'Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves' hit the screen, to less than entire praise from critics, one grumble was that Robin / Kevin arrives at the white cliffs of Dover, sets off walking and, a couple of hours later, reaches Nottingham. Obviously, the screen writers had little concept of the distance between the south coast and Nottingham. Similarly, in Pandemic, the group of heroes is is the Shetland Isles, just a long spit from the Arctic Circle but they get into their propeller-driven aircraft and, half a page later, are landing in southern Australia. So that's, literally, half way around the world in a trice and all without stopping or refueling.

The main character is left incarcerated at the end of the book, setting up the next book neatly.Despite my grumbles, I'll almost certainly buy the second book, just to see how it all ends.

12 people found this helpful

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Mr. Robert Bishop

Rambling and implausible

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 19 July 2018

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I bought this as beach reading and it seemed at first very promising. The two strands, the growing epidemic on the borders of Kenya and Somalia and the mystery of Desmond’s memory loss move along at a fast pace. But then it becomes more and more implausible with coincidence piled on coincidence until I completely lost interest and skipped through the last 100 pages. A good editor might have helped him turn this into a good read but my advice would be to find something better to read.

12 people found this helpful

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Dogbite Dave

Very middle of the road. NOT a page turner

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 19 March 2020

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I write this review on the basis of decades as a non stop bibliophile.

I read anything and everything, especially history and scientific.

This book falls into the scientific but to some degree much of the pandemics spread can be explained in history.

The book takes a lot of reading / plodding along before it starts to take an interesting slant.

If you have ever read a book with Ebola and similar, it will cover most of this book.

The guy being set up as hero, fall guy. The good looking female doctor torn between dedication and loins or family. The hint of bad guys and conspiracy theorists will sit up.

The victims dying slow and hard unless lucky.

It’s all in here but nothing that stands out as a page turner.

Slow steady dialogue which does little to stretch an imagination. I have plodded through and am more or less committed to the next book but unless it improves substantially I shall write off a series as a lost cause.

5 people found this helpful

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Jon W

So good for the first 2/3 or so.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 7 August 2017

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It starts off so well. So well that you're thinking, "shall I pre-order the next book".

Hold fire (minor spoilers ahead). About 2/3 of the way through the book it falls into silliness. Why can't we just have a great book or set of books about a pandemic and the efforts to stop it. Why add in all the rubbish about ancient societies and everyone's relatives having met everyone else's relatives? Why dive into a manic and confusing zig-zag across the world where you begin to stop caring about where they are this time and which secondary character has popped up again.

I nearly made it to the end but jumped ship with a few chapters to go as it was becoming a chore rather than something to look forward to.

11 people found this helpful

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Capt.Scarlet

Unbelievable Mess -

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 September 2018

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Two Stars because the first two fifths of the book are engaging and intriguing - the rest is unbelievable drivel.
I'll admit I did read it all but started skipping the chapters about Elliott- he had no impact or bearing on the plot or characters.
The part where Eeyore munches on a Piglet sandwich whilst Winnie the Pooh gives himself a back, sack and crack is the best part.

Ok, ok that doesn’t really happen but the twist and reveals after about page 200 are just as unbelievable

4 people found this helpful

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Paulcw

Very Good Book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 29 July 2017

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One of the biggest problems I've ever had with books is trying to sort the good from the average - (Amazon has helped with that problem with customer reviews, but even then you get people with agendas)

Every now and then however, a really good book comes to light, good concept, excellently researched and explained science, well built characters and a decent size which isn't just knocked out to increase sales and you finish it in a day. I really enjoyed this book and if you like to read good old fashioned action thrillers, with science thrown and written at a decent pace, this book is for you.

Looking forward to the next book, it might take a while but the author is right - quality does beat quantity.

4 people found this helpful

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Fengirl

Covid 19?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 June 2018

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I am writing this having re read the book during the Coronavirus lockdown, and I am amazed at the prescience of the author! The tale concerns the rapid spread worldwide of a new and unnamed viral infection (spooky given recent circumstances) and the enormous damage resulting from the disease; again, as in the present day
Drama and excitement aplenty, some pretty dire situations and all managed with no bad language - a thing beyond MANY authors
I have read some of the other reviews and yes, the ending is a bit fanciful, some of the strings have got tied up in knots but HEY!!!! it's not a textbook, and there is a follow on.

3 people found this helpful

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Trudi Gordon

Entertaining Read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 May 2017

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How wonderful it is to read a book that is well written and researched. This is the 5th book I have read from this author and I have already pre-ordered Genome. I won't spoil the plot, but the book flowed easily, the characters were engaging and it was amazing how it all came together. You really cared. My only "complaint" was that I was suffering from the flu whilst reading it and began to think the whole book was real. I can highly recommend this author as from his first book he has become one of my favourites. You won't regret buying it and if you enjoy it as much as I did, please check out his first series.

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Chris solloway

Well worth the read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 November 2017

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I personally found this story to be slow burner, where as in the previous books everything was happening. My issue is that I was comparing the story to the previous, when I stopped I enjoyed it so much more. The characters histories and connections are enlightening, the research that has gone into this is amazing. I take my hat off to you Mr Riddle as you have written an amazing book, I ordered Genome while only half way through Extinction files so will be fully submerged in that for a while.

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Kerry Mutter

Too good to miss.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 April 2017

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Once again Riddle gives us a strong and exciting story, enough resolution to not feel frustrated at the end and just the right amount of cliffhanger to leave us anticipating the next installment.

I've always been able to guess the endings of books; it's my only super power, but Riddle is clearly my arch nemesis and has me questioning what the truth of Pandemic and Looking Glass is!

I love Riddle's ability to immerse the reader fully in the disparate characters, and the fact that he doesn't dumb down the science that makes the story so thrilling. Having read all his books so far, my only complaint is that they're so good, I resent having to wait for the next in the series.

I hereby volunteer myself as a beta reader if required!

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The Cosmic Whelk

Now read on... Oh bother: it's finished.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 29 April 2017

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Really quite good - and amazingly free of typos. Which is saying something, nowadays. It's also well researched. Docking a star, perhaps unfairly, because it's not exactly great literature. It is, on the other hand, worth reading, and quite absorbing. Sadly, being the first in a series, it leaves you hanging at the end, which is something that really annoys me about these serial books. However, it's long - unlike so many of them - and good value.

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J. Mcghee

Starts well but then ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 November 2019

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The story starts well with a good procedural description of the start of a pandemic and the global responses to it, but after about half way becomes a far-fetched good guys v villains tale across the world in impossible time scales , unlikely solutions and at least 3 people suddenly back from the dead. An adventure in the style of Dan Brown, and I don't like Dan Brown. I'll be avoiding the sequels.

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David Robinson

Good read with a twist to the usual pandemic books

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 November 2018

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Great action packed story that all unravels at a fast pace. I liked all the background factual information. Made it more interesting. Reminded me of a Dan Brown novel in parts. Yes I’ll go on to read book 2 as you do want to know what happens to both the characters and the unfolding story.

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Anticipate a great read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 29 October 2019

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Nope, not read this one yet. Amazon keeps pressing me for a review, so here it is. I have yet to read it, hence no review yet. I do however really like the books by A. G. Riddle and anticipate a great read.

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