Quarantine by John Smolens

This story was...hmmm...interesting. I love historical fiction. Oh, and theres' a plague? BONUS! And a creepy, lecherous cretin with bad teeth and a lazy eye? OK, I could have done with less of him. I'm reading it thinking "This would be great for teens!" until I came to a certain scene where the mother of the house walks in on her adult son (THE CRETIN!) in a very compromising position and begins reaming him out while he continues his deplorable activities with a random young lady as if she never entered. There were a number of these scenes which just caught me off guard and made me wonder about the target audience age. For some reason, the gruesome details of the plague effects seemed fine to me - probably because you saw it coming if you knew what the book was about. But the gratuitous naughty bits could have been down-played without having a detrimental effect on the story. It gets 4 out of five clams, would have been a 5 if there was less of the cretin, or even just the removal of that one icky scene.