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 AIDS travelling south to England to find treatment they can’t get in Scotland. 

Val McDermid rips into all this with all her readable gusto. It’s a great read. And all the time you are reading, it’s just impossible not to see a withering, lacerating portrait of an egotistical, gluttonous bully at the heart of the fire burning through the pages.