On Saturday, at Linlithgow’s bijou book festival, Val McDermid could not tell her audience very much about her new novel, Splinter the Silence, for fear of giving away the plot.
What she did reveal, however, is that its subject is the rise of internet trolls, those offensive patrollers of the online world who make twitterers of thin skin and anxious disposition nervous to broadcast even the blandest remarks. If J K Rowling can be savaged for expressing delight at the Scottish rugby squad’s performance in the world cup quarter final, what is safe for someone to say without fear of cyber assault?
McDermid believes that women are far more often the butt of trolls than men, despite the fact she has rarely been targeted. Even when she appeared on Question Time, a programme where, with the exception of politicians, most women’s performance is routinely met by twitter abuse, she emerged unscathed. Perhaps, as her teenage son has helpfully suggested, this is because she looks “so scary”. Or because, as her fiction attests, she knows countless undetectable ways to kill people.
Psychological profiler Tony Hall and ex-DCI Carol Jordan return in a timely investigation into online abuse
Lucy Scholes
Sunday 13 September 2015 14.00 BST
Val McDermid is back with her much-loved crime-fighting partnership, psychological profiler Tony Hill and ex-DCI Carol Jordan.
The case that reunites them is a chillingly timely one, focusing on online abuse suffered by outspoken women with a feminist agenda. This isn’t the conventional setup though: there’s “no forensics, no loose ends to pull”, not even a murder verdict to kickstart the investigation – just three seemingly unconnected suicides, each mimicking that of a famous writer: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Virginia Woolf.
Val McDermid has written the work for Dundee University’s online forensic investigation course…
It has all the hallmarks of her blockbuster novels – a body on a hill, a mystery about its identity and a forensic expert who can solve it all.
But Val McDermid’s latest bestseller will not be hitting any bookshops after the crime writer penned the words for an online course in forensic investigation for Dundee University.
More than 16,000 people have registered for the free course, called Identifying The Dead: forensic science and human identification, ahead of its launch on Monday. However, organisers expect many more to sign up to discover how the case unfolds. Those who do will spend six weeks searching for clues and piecing the mystery together.
SEPTEMBER 3RD, 2015