1989
Is this Val McDermid’s revenge upon Robert Maxwell? I know next to nothing about her career as a journalist, but even that little is enough to suggest parallels between main character Allie Burns and McDermid herself. Working as a journalist, Allie sees her hard-hitting stories get turned into tabloid, gay-hating garbage by editors concerned only with readership figures. And those editors work for a – very, very – thinly disguised Robert Maxwell . In this case, Ace Lockhart: a man who made his fortune with academic journals and is now obsessed with besting Rupert Murdoch at his own tabloid trash game. A man of gargantuan appetites quite happy to loot his employees’ pension fund to buy a New York newspaper he knows Murdoch is after. Oh, and he has a daughter, Genevieve. There’s a murder plot; a trip to Poland to discover the truth behind the lone survivor of a WW2 Nazi massacre; the aforesaid scheme to steal from the pension fund; and a feature about Scottish sufferers of AID...
