A reporter felt like the coolest, most romantic job in the world when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein helped overthrow Richard Nixon. Journalism school was crowded with young people. However, newspapers still fight to exist fifty years later. To preserve the bottom line, media barons take action. And governments everywhere put a lot of effort into suppressing the news.
Even so, there are brave reporters who are willing to stand up for what’s right, particularly in fiction. One of these is the heroine of a crime series by the great Scottish author Philip Miller, who lives in Edinburgh and is called Shona Sandison. Shona is researching a mystery conspiracy with somewhat nefarious goals in the third and most recent part, The Diary of Lies, which is currently available from Soho Crime. This book is a lament for a Great Britain that has lost its way, not one of those quaint British crime thrillers.
As the action starts, Shona, a reporter for the alternative news outlet Buried Lede, is in London for an awards banquet where she is a nominee. Always a little prickly, she is bored and irritated with the occasion before being buttonholed by a dapper, pink-faced man named Reece Proctor, whose accent she finds “comfortable, fatty.” He hands her a card with an address on it and insists he has a tale for her. He urges her to go there and request “bondage.”
This may sound kinky, if not hilarious, but there’s something about Proctor that compels her to do as he says. Indeed, he dispatched her to a sex store, where she dutifully requests bondage. Then everything is different. In addition to being thrown into a murderous scheme, Shona learns about a plot involving Grendel, the monster from Beowulf, as you may remember. Grendel, on the other hand, learns about Shona. She turns into a target.
As is common in this type of thriller, Shona will receive assistance from a number of colorful characters, such as the famous female artist whose most recent piece honors the hundreds of thousands of Britons who perished from COVID, including Shona’s father, and the apocalyptic hacker who is removing his family from the grid. Back in Scotland, we follow two additional important characters: Mr. Tallis, an irate former spy, and Hector, a nervous public relations hack. Both of them are unwittingly drawn into Grendel’s dark orbit.
As far as mysteries go, The Diary of Lies is eerily sinister. When we refer to a tale as “dark,” we can allude to a variety of things, such as David Lynch’s dreamy small-town violence or the metaphysical evil found in novels like No Country for Old Men. The political gloom of The Diary of Lies is more reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale than Twin Peaks.
Miller imagines a post-COVID, Brexit-era Britain that is busy abandoning its greatest traditions while Shona runs from killers and investigates Grendel. The wealthy class manipulates the government, media, think tanks, private security, and finance to suit their own interests, even while the nation’s services are collapsing. When Shona eventually learns of Grendel’s grand scheme, I would have scoffed at its exaggerated absurdity ten years ago because it is such a terrible and archaic societal policy. The plan no longer appears absurd, which speaks to our historical situation.
To make matters worse, almost every character we see is demoralized or exhausted by the state of affairs in their nation. In fact, Hector and Shona’s ex-boyfriend Ned’s dejection at their current state is one of the book’s most poignant scenes. They work for individuals they hate but feel unable to oppose, abandoning their previous values.
That isn’t the case with the indomitable Shona, who has so many hats that you almost expect honey to start trickling down her forehead. She may be irritable and distant, but those traits contribute to her excellence as a reporter. She doesn’t let things go easily. She never stops being angry that her father’s death could have been avoided if the government had taken COVID more seriously, nor does she stop mourning for her father, her mentor in journalism. Once she is on Grendel’s trail, she never stops working until she finds the truth.
Despite all its warnings of dictatorship, The Diary of Lies isn’t a bummer because of her sheer determination. Shona always puts herself in danger to get the story out, even when she’s scared. She continues to believe that the truth will change everything.
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