The Scottish writer Philip Miller has a lot on his mind. Over the course of three books, he’s built a view of post-Brexit, post-coronavirus Great Britain through the investigative journalism of his heroine, Shona Sandison, that’s gotten darker and more apocalyptic each time. They’ve all been prescient, but his latest, The Diary of Lies, is the most full-throated warning yet.
Miller has been compared to fellow tartan-noir writers and Mick Herron (of Slow Horses fame) for his jaundiced attitude toward the British government and intelligence services, but where Herron mocks their absurdity and incompetence, Miller is chilling and doom-laden in his furiously poetic depiction of a once great civilization going off the rails. This green and pleasant land is headed for the dumper, politically, environmentally, and morally, as the shadow of Fascism looms. Addressing this through the framework of crime fiction—laced with surreal doses of Old English and Celtic folklore—produces a fascinating hybrid that is Miller’s alone.
In his universe, the only way to disrupt the Orwellian slide into authoritarianism is for a few good people to do something. One of them is Shona, a pugnacious reporter who doesn’t scare easily, despite having to walk with a cane after being attacked on the job. Fresh from winning a Scoop of the Year award (for the Brexit-related exposé in Miller’s previous book, The Hollow Tree), she’s tipped off by an anonymous source to look into an entity called Grendel.
When alarms are tripped by her reporting, she’s challenged at every turn by ruthless opposition. People who might know something die under suspicious circumstances, and an old friend betrays her.
Threaded through Shona’s hunt for Grendel is the diary of a formidable ex-military-intelligence man (introduced in Miller’s first Shona Sandison book, The Goldenacre) who’s done terrible things in the name of his country and neglected to protect his vulnerable son when he needed it most. He’s now hunkered down in his Fife redoubt, ruminating on the past and making a plan that will intersect with Shona’s pursuit.
There are other absent fathers in The Diary of Lies who have either left their families or had that choice made for them. We see the fallout in Shona’s grief over her own father, an old-school journalist who died of the coronavirus. When one of her contacts, a sculptor called Valerian Grammaticus, explains why she has created a memorial to the pandemic dead, the narrative stands still as she makes an oracular speech about national amnesia in the face of such a massive loss. What she has to say will make you remember and weep.
Grammaticus isn’t the only quasi-magical, whimsically monikered character Shona encounters as she gets closer to identifying Grendel. A hacker named Robin Loxley (as in Hood) turns up to unlock an important secret, and Hector Stricken, a former colleague, risks everything to help. Which brings us to Grendel, a code name inspired by the monster from Beowulf. It turns out to be apt, embodying the worst threat Shona has yet encountered. Evil is not banal in The Diary of Lies—it’s a dragon coiled in a Scottish castle, ready to slither out and unleash its foulness.
In the new series Code of Silence, Rose Ayling-Ellis stars as Alison Woods, who, like Shona, is disabled. While Shona’s recently acquired impairment has made her snappish and irritable, Alison has been deaf since birth, so it’s an integral part of her identity that she handles with grace and pragmatism.
Alying-Ellis is the show’s sparkling center, lifting an otherwise perfectly fine heist drama into a more emotionally resonant realm with her watchful intelligence and Everygirl pluck. She isn’t defined by her deafness—she’s a fully realized character whose dreary job at the police-department canteen does not match her potential. We’re on Team Alison from day one.
By a fluke, the precinct where she works is short of lip-readers who can help with surveillance of a ring of jewelry thieves, and Alison is recommended as a fill-in. She’s so good at getting information from video that, against their better judgment, the police detectives let her work first in the field, then undercover at a bar owned by a member of the crew.
This is a dicey arrangement, and when she seems to be getting too close to the crew’s tech specialist (a very un-nerdy Kieron Moore), her handlers try to pull her out. They vacillate between exploiting her, trying to keep her safe, and not trusting her. The ethics of the situation are tricky, since Alison often pushes for and does more than they ask. The detectives played by Andrew Buchan, Nathan Amarkwei Laryea, and Charlotte Ritchie convey this ambivalence with a grainy mix of keenness and discomfort.
It’s always nerve-racking to watch an undercover operative in action, but when that person is untrained and has the added vulnerability of a disability, it can be torturous. This is down to Ayling-Ellis, who radiates the avidity of someone who, for the first time in her boring life, is doing something special and exciting that she excels at, so she brushes off the danger signals and charges ahead. Her transformation from scullery maid to undercover adventuress is a little like a crime-show version of Cinderella—we can only hope there’s no pumpkin in her future.
Lisa Henricksson reviews mysteries for Air Mail. She lives in New York City
