Write about what you know, that's what they tell ya. And so Navy and Marine vet and family man Steven Konkoly, who works for a pharmaceutical company writes a novel starring Alex Fletcher, who is an Iraqi War vet, a sales representative for Biosphere Pharmaceuticals, and a family man. Then he gets a phone call in the middle of a Friday night, on September 2, 2013 about the first cases of a new flu pandemic from his friend Dr. Wright, who is the head of the Maine Medical Center's Infectious Disease Department. It seems that already Hong Kong & China are being devastated, and now the cases in America are expanding exponentially. The news media initially downplays the pandemic until it is too late, however, as the casualties mount Alex decides to bunker down in his home that is on a cul de sac in Scarborough Maine. While neglecting to inform Biosphere, Alex also quits his job, and gets his friends, on Biosphere and off, to do the same. So there is much disconcertion amongst his one time employers when he not only tells them of his prematurely retirement, AND that he has given away most of his drug samples to his friend Dr. Wright. While undergoing a forced reorganization during the snowballing pandemic, Biosphere decides that Alex might have been less than honest with them. So they send his ex-boss and a couple of yahoos to confiscate his samples. This leads to a manhandling of his wife, a scuffle, and an all around skunking of everybody involved by pepper spray. Alex's headaches continue as there are also several neighborhood meetings in which neighborhood loyalties are drawn up with Alex being on the wrong side of the more skittish of his neighbors. "The Jakarta Pandemic" had some problems with its first two hundred pages. Konkoly meanders towards the mid-point, casually developing the novel's premise, Alex, and Alex's situation and character. Both of which would be alright if something interesting were to have happened during that page count, but nothing really did. There are two hundred pages of character and situation development that easily could have been boiled down to a hundred pages, or less. This is two hundred ten by seven inch pages, or close to almost four hundred standard mass market paperback pages in which nothing really exciting really happens other than several neighborhood meetings and two rather unexciting scuffles. The neighborhood meetings themselves always just ended up in squabbles and going nowhere, and it was all very tiresome. The world is ending, nations are falling, the populace is panicking, medicine and food is running out, and the nation's social structure is collapsing, and what we get is the equivalent of a pre-kindergarten class where the children do nothing but argue as to who gets to eat the red crayons and who gets to shove the black ones up their noses. This novel could really have benefited from a multi-perspective viewpoint, as we could then see some of the nation's events through some other eyes other than JUST Alex's, ***yawn***, myopic vision as viewed on his computer screen. And since we ONLY see the world's events through Alex's eyes through-out the novel, a sense of immediacy is missing. We get the same myopic vision of the rest of the novel's characters and their development in the novel, as they each have characteristics more than character development. His wife is more worried about the content of her kid's books, movies, or games rather than the world's situation until the novel's second half, or how the world's situation will affect them. Alex's children are characterless as they seem to do nothing but read, listen to music, or play games while they are isolated. Yet they never seem to be worried, or ask about their relatives, friends, or classmates. In fact, the Fletchers often come across as obnoxiously perfect, eating the perfect foods, being the perfect neighbors and family, and being the perfect example of what we should all aspire to. Everybody else is even less developed; leaving the reader to have little involvement in their eventual fates, something that could have been lessened by including a few other viewpoints other than Alex's. And during the first part, almost NOBODY but Alex seems to taking the upcoming pandemic very seriously, and since there seem to be too many interchangeable peripheral characters; a character listing would have been appreciated. So, after two hundred pages of tedious meandering I had to put this book down, and go read something else, but since I had promised somebody that I would read it, I came back and finished it. And things start picking up in the novel in the third quarter as the neighbors and the neighborhood start isolating themselves, and, as Alex nicknames them, the psycho Manson family moves into the neighborhood and squats in an abandoned home. It is with these people, and Alex's interaction with them, that is the meat of last quarter of the novel and the novel's suspense is ratcheted up to the point where the reader will find themselves glued to their chairs. The readers will also start experiencing as sense of paranoia, causing the reader to want to strap on a gun themselves every time it gets dark. Still, this is a novel that falls into the "cozy catastrophe" category. Is the world significantly changed after the pandemic? Read the novel and see. Readers will often forgive a bad beginning when the ending is good rather forgive a good beginning with a bad ending, but I take notes, and I don't forgive. This is why this novel only gets three stars because it is just too long, with a meandering first two hundred pages, zero character development, a singular, narrow character viewpoint, and a saccharine last chapter that undermines much of the last quarter of the novel. I was also curious as to what had happened to Alex's ex-workmates, especially since so much time was spent with them during the beginning of the novel. Loose ends, loose ends, too bad, so sad. One last thing, setting this book so soon in the near future (2013) will make this book as instantly dated in a year or two as all of those apocalyptical endtimes books set in 2000 that were published so long ago. Since this is a print-on-demand book, will the pandemics date be changed when the year 2012 is over? Whatever, this review concerns the new, second, and extensively revised edition. Oh yeah, and during all of this, what was Stephen King doing?