Back when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein helped bring down Richard Nixon's presidency, being a reporter seemed like the coolest, most romantic job in the world. The young flocked to journalism school. Half a century on, though, newspapers struggle just to survive. Media barons buckle to protect the bottom line. And governments everywhere work hard to muzzle the press.
Still, there are some intrepid reporters ready to fight the good fight — especially in fiction. One of these is Shona Sandison, the Edinburgh-based heroine of a crime series by the terrific Scottish writer Philip Miller. The third and latest installment — The Diary of Lies — is now out from Soho Crime, and it finds Shona investigating a mysterious cabal whose aims are more than a little sinister. Far from being one of those cozy British crime stories, this novel offers a lament for a Great Britain that's lost its bearings.
Shona is a reporter for the alternative news service Buried Lede, and as the action begins, she's in London attending an awards dinner at which she's a nominee. Always a tad prickly, she's bored and annoyed by the event even before she's buttonholed by a posh, pink-faced chap named Reece Proctor whose accent she finds "comfortable, fatty." Insisting he has a story for her, he hands her a card with an address on it. Go there, he tells her, and ask for "bondage."
Although this sounds comical if not kinky, something about Proctor makes her follow his instructions. Arriving at a sex shop — yes, that's where he sent her — she dutifully asks for bondage. And then everything changes. Not only is Shona catapulted into a murder plot, but she catches wind of a conspiracy called Grendel — that's the monster in Beowulf, as you'll recall. And Grendel, for its part, catches wind of Shona. She becomes a target.
As happens in this kind of thriller, Shona will get help from a clutch of colorful characters — the apocalyptic hacker who's pulling his family off the grid, the famous woman artist whose latest work commemorates the hundreds of thousands of Britons who died of COVID, including Shona's father. Meanwhile, back in Scotland, we follow two other key characters — a nervous PR hack named Hector, and an embittered ex-spy, Mr. Tallis. They both find themselves sucked, unawares, into Grendel's shadowy orbit.
Now, as mysteries go, The Diary of Lies is unsettlingly dark. Of course, when we call a story "dark," we can be referring to many different things — the dreamy small-town violence of David Lynch, or the metaphysical evil you find in, say, No Country for Old Men. The darkness of The Diary of Lies is political — closer in spirit to The Handmaid's Tale than to Twin Peaks.
As Shona flees killers and digs into Grendel, Miller conjures up a post-COVID, Brexit-ized Britain that is busy betraying its greatest traditions. Even as the country's services are falling apart, the moneyed class bends finance, government, media, think tanks and private security to its own ends. When Shona finally discovers Grendel's masterplan, it's a social policy so cruel and retrograde that, 10 years ago, I would have laughed at its hyperbolic preposterousness. It says something about our historical moment that the scheme no longer seems laughable.
Making things even worse, nearly all the characters we meet feel defeated or worn out by what's happening in their country. In fact, some of the book's sharpest moments come when characters like Hector and Shona's old beau Ned despair over what they've become. Casting off their former ideals, they work for people they detest but feel powerless to resist.
Not so the redoubtable Shona, who has so many bees in her bonnet that you half expect honey to start dripping down her forehead. Yes, she's standoffish and impatient, but those qualities help make her a great reporter. She's not one to let things go. She never stops grieving for her father — her journalistic mentor — nor stops being furious that his death might've been prevented if the government had taken COVID more seriously. Once on the trail of Grendel, she keeps working relentlessly on until she gets to the bottom of things.
Her sheer doggedness is why, despite all its premonitions of tyranny, The Diary of Lies isn't a bummer. Even when she's terrified, Shona will always risk everything to get the story out. She still has faith that the truth will make a difference.
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