The threat of coronavirus Covid-19 brings chilling new prescience to Lesley Kelly's Edinburgh-set Health of Strangers novels - Liam Rudden

Set in an Edinburgh of the near future, in a Britain that requires citizens to undergo regular health checks due to the outbreak of a deadly virus that ravaged the population, the first Health of Strangers novel was published in 2017. Did Kelly know something we didn’t?

Today, when there seems to be no escaping talk of Covid-19, the coronavirus, there’s a chilling new prescience to her novels, the fourth of which, Murder At The Music Factory, is due to be published on 23 April, by Sandstone Press (£7.99).

The latest in the series continues the ongoing adventures of the North Edinburgh Health Enforcement Team (HET) - the public servants dispatched to track down defaulters who fail to attend their monthly health check. Like its predecessors, 2018’s gripping 2018’s Songs by Dead Girls and last year’s brilliantly layered Death at the Plague Museum, the new novel is a thrilling read that, despite its fictional nature, paints an uncomfortably plausible picture of a society on ‘lock down’ and the shady politics at its heart.

Covid-19, thankfully, as the experts will tell you should peak and then wain as have previous such outbreaks, but imagine if it didn’t. This is the world in which Kelly’s North Edinburgh HET operate, juggling tracking down absconders with being used covertly by factions of the Scottish Government.

Having been lucky enough to be sent a preview copy of Murder At The Music Factory, I can reveal, without fear of spoilers, that it is an incendiary read. This time, the HET are in a race against time to track down an undercover agent who has gone rogue, threatening to shoot a civil servant a day.

Again laced with Kelly’s trademark dark humour and her innate ability to capture the bureaucratic nightmare created by the virus without ever letting the pace slip, this is a book you won’t put down until the last page.

And talking of which, as someone who loves a good cliff-hanger, Murder At The Music Factory races towards a breathless climax, living up to everything we’ve come to expect from this intelligent and compelling series. All the more thought-provoking because of the situation the world finds itself in at this moment, you can’t help wondering, what if?

Thankfully, earlier this month, the World Health Organisation reported that the original epidemic in China ‘peaked and plateaued between the 23 January and 2 February, and has been declining steadily since then.’

Hopefully that will be replicated around the world, although, as I said, fact can indeed be stranger than fiction.