Man, I love his books. I want them made as movies. I want series drilling down on the sci-fi of it. I want more!

Unfortunately, after 600 odd pages, the saga comes to an end.

The Orbital had watched. The Orbital had learned.
Its first infection vector had been rather simple in concept: spores that floated on the air, released by the Orbital from its position some forty miles above the earth. Those spores hijacked the host’s stem cells, reprogrammed them, turned them into microscopic factories. The factories punched out parts that self-assembled into triangles. Left unchecked, those triangles grew into hatchlings.
The shotgun approach of a high-altitude release meant that most spores were wasted. They blew into areas of low population, got stuck on the ground, or simply fell into wet areas where they crumbled into bits of nothing. When spores did land on a host, they worked well, but a hatchling couldn’t make more hatchlings. Nor could a hatchling spread the contagion by infecting additional human hosts.
So the Orbital had changed strategy.
It created a new design: the microscopic crawlers. Crawlers didn’t hatch out of a host. Instead, they migrated into the host’s brain, reshaped it, modified the host’s instincts and behaviors. A crawler-infected host could make new crawlers to infect other hosts. Unlike the hatchlings, crawlers could reproduce. They could spread. It was Chelsea — not the Orbital — who solved that problem.
She created a third mode of transmission: turning her own mother into an obscenely bloated gas-filled bag containing millions of spores. At some point this swollen host would burst, scattering spores onto the wind like dandelion seeds carried by a summer breeze. The method was similar to the Orbital’s original infection strategy, but the swelling host was already on the ground — that meant better odds for a higher rate of transmission. Each spore could infect a host with triangles, or with crawlers, or it could turn that host into yet another gasbag that would burst and continue the cycle.
Before the Orbital was shot down, its logic processes determined it needed yet another mode of transmission, something that allowed for infection by touch alone, or — more important — by a vector that lingered in areas of high contact where multiple potential hosts could be exposed. As part of that strategy, the Orbital also wanted one additional key element: that this new vector could continue to infect long after the host died …

If you’re looking for a book about a virus that takes over the world, no need to look further.

Murray had watched, stunned, as a man who told the truth was washed out of office by a nation that didn’t want to believe humanity was not alone in the universe. Blackmon hadn’t rallied just the Bible thumpers. No, you couldn’t win in America anymore if you only paid attention to the religious Right. You also needed the Koran thumpers, the Talmud thumpers, and the thumpers of all moldy old books suitable for thumping. She found a way to gather all of those people into her fold without alienating her Christian base. Countering her strategy, practically every scientist in the country stood firmly behind Gutierrez. They trotted out papers and studies and formulas that proved he was telling the truth, yet that didn’t matter.
When it comes to politics and tragedy, in the end people need someone to blame.

The last book in the trilogy sees America crumbling under its own political blindness and the hero of the two previous books slowly becoming the villain of the third. She is infected but the infection doesn’t tell her to go and spread like the previous times, it tells her to plan, to be smart, to rule.

Clarence Otto had to die.
They all had to die.
All of them … all the humans.
Margaret had turned off the lights in her bunk module. She sat alone in the dark, thinking. She finally understood. Why had she fought against this for so long? It was so obvious. People had turned the earth into a cesspool of hatred and waste, had taken the gift of winning evolution’s grand game and pissed it away.
She got it now. She understood. The Orbital had tried to fix things, it had tried to do …
… to do …
… to do God’s work.

Margaret’s former self had tried to second-guess the Orbital, tried to figure out what strategy would come next. She’d never even considered its latest tactic: create an infectious agent that the cellulose kits didn’t detect.
An infectious agent that turned brilliant humans into converted leaders.

At the same time, the virus has flown the coop. It traveled all over the world and the infection spread from commoners to world leaders. Margaret was not the only leaders, she was just one of many. Murray and his men are looking at world war possibly commencing any moment now.

“Seismic readings indicate a nuclear detonation in south-central Russia,” he said. “Approximately twenty megatons, believed to be of Chinese origin.”
Murray’s stomach did flip-flops. A nuke. A goddamn nuke. It changed the game in every possible way. Not only was the world up against a disease that turned humanity against itself, the disease had apparently learned how to push the button. [..] “Third-largest city in Russia, behind Moscow and St. Petersburg. Population, one-point-five million.”
On the screen, the mushroom cloud continued to rise. Murray found himself wishing that this was a joke, the prank of some sick, twisted fuck.
It wasn’t.
“My God,” Blackmon said. “This is really happening.”

All over the country people are fighting colds, listening to ever spreading mis-information and fear-mongering. We all know how Covid went down – the talks about bleach ingestion or different home remedies for it that left more dead than alive.

From his little table in the Coronado’s cargo hold, Tim Feely studied the numbers. New York City, Minneapolis, Grand Rapids and Chicago were no longer providing consumer data. They were too far gone for that.
Elsewhere in the country, people were stocking up on whatever they could before it was too late. That panic skewed the consumer pattern information, but there was still enough data from which to draw conclusions.

Philadelphia: 9,000% increase in cough suppressants
Lexington: huge spikes in purchases of fever reducer
Fayetteville: All stores sold out of pain relievers

There are outbreaks everywhere, people are infected not with just one type of alien virus, but with one of many. There are spore spreaders, kissers, bloaters, and worse, the ones that don’t look infected at all but control the rest.

The good news is that Tom Feely is working on a vaccine and it’s working. The problem is that people refuse to take it.

The rest of the world’s infected estimate had surpassed the USA’s and was expected to skyrocket in the next few days. While 65 percent of Americans were now immunized, there was no measuring how many people across the globe had received the Feely yeast strain. The best estimate was just 15 percent of the world’s population.
That left six billion potential hosts. […]

Murray had harbored no illusions about the overwhelming magnitude of this situation, but now an even harsher truth started to hit home.
“Immunity alone isn’t going to do it,” he said quietly. “We have to find a way to kill these fucking things, all of them, or we’re facing an extinction event — we’ll be gone. Someone wake up the president. And get Margaret Montoya on this screen, right now.”

As Margaret becomes involved in higher and higher circles of power, she is craving her escape and the collapse of human society. She is planning to kill everyone but is biding her time until she can unleash the most destruction on everyone. It’s only her husband, Otto, who sees what’s happening and manages to deliver the killing shot to her

Not only was Pandemic a great read, it was the perfect climax to a series that got better with every installment. You’re never really sure what’s going to happen, or who is going to survive.