THE DIARY OF LIES

Fresh off her award for Scoop of the Year for unmasking the undercover dealmaking behind Brexit, freelance Edinburgh journalist Shona Sandison lands an even bigger, and more dangerous, scoop.

At the award ceremony in London, Shona is chatted up by Reece Proctor, of the Dovetail think tank, who promises her a sensational story if she’ll go to a local sex shop and ask for bondage. The trip makes her queasy, and the documents she picks up at the shop offer no more than hints. Meanwhile, Shona’s former colleague Hector Stricken, now working as media officer for a new agency called Capacity and Resilience (Scotland), gets wind of a secret project codenamed Grendel and jots down a few notes. After he mistakenly swaps briefcases with his old pal Adam Rokeby following an epic drinking bout, Eric Kapp, his superior at Alacrity House, dresses him down because not even the slightest hint about Grendel, which is more than Hector knows himself, can reach the public. All the while, a retired civil servant who’s taken the name Benjamin Wolf is keeping a diary filled with cryptic references to an eventful past linked to Shona’s previous two adventures by the discovery of the corpse of art expert Thomas Tallis. Readers thinking this sounds a lot like the murky government intelligence tales of Mick Herron’s books about the agents farmed out to Slough House are on the right track. But Grendel turns out to be something bigger and scarier than anything Herron’s Slow Horses have encountered, or than the predictable surprises that awaited Shona in those other two cases.

Miller’s greatest gift is to get you to care about his characters long before you’ve figured out what they’re looking for.