Soho
Published August 12, 2025
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
Shona Sandison is in London at a journalism banquet when a strange man approaches her with a promised scoop. After accepting an award for her bombshell investigation of rising extremism (recounted in 2024’s The Hollow Tree), she goes to the place where the man told her to pick up a package. It turns out to be a dismal sex shop, and she’s not sure what to make of the device he’s left for her, some sort of antiquated cell phone that she can’t turn on. She hopes he’ll explain it all when they meet, as arranged, but instead she finds he’s been gruesomely beaten to death. While she looks at the gory scene, a masked man comes after her with a bloody hammer and she barely escapes with her life.
While she’s fleeing the killer, her old friend and colleague Hector Stricken is having a miserable time at a new job. Having abandoned the failing profession of journalism, he has become a PR flack for a new government agency in Edinburgh with the anodyne name Capacity and Resilience (Scotland). He finds himself completely at sea, unable to figure out what’s expected of him or what the new agency actually does. After arranging a disastrous press event he’s told to attend a video meeting where he lurks and tries to piece together what’s under discussion, some new and sinister program called “Grendel.” Sensing it may be newsworthy, he sends a message to Shona before he gets in serious trouble for losing track of his briefcase. Apparently the work he doesn’t even understand is highly sensitive and he may lose his job.
Shona, meanwhile, tries to erase her tracks as she flees to meet a tech savant living in a ruined mansion in the west of England to see what secrets her mysterious device might contain. Interleaved in these separate storylines, an embittered elderly man writes letters to his deceased son whom he neglected in favor of a career in espionage. All of these stories come together in the end as Shona dodges danger and puts together evidence to write the biggest story of her career, revealing a shocking plan before it’s too late.
The outline of the plot may sound like many a political conspiracy thriller, but in Miller’s hands it’s something quite different. He weaves in acutely drawn characters who are as memorable and original as Dickens’, giving them speech patterns that are anthropological in their ability to nail down cultural referents. The tech specialist, widowed by Covid, is convinced some sort of Armageddon is at hand and is packing up, taking his children to some remote and secret country to survive. As in The Hollow Tree, Miller weaves in references to ancient mythic Britain. The unnamed ex-spy relates a strange dream or hallucination of encountering an ancient king lying in a craggy forest temple, a huge antlered figure, the “soul of this island place,” lying in a grotto, dead and forgotten.
Shona, who retains some faith in the power of journalism but is not given to spirituality, grieves for her father who died in the first wave of the pandemic. She begins to find some sense of consolation when she’s urged by a friend to “tell the bees,” an old folk tradition. We take a short pause in the rocketing pace of the story to climb with her up Arthur’s Seat to remember and mourn and say to a passing bee “Hey, bee… my old dad is gone.”
Without sacrificing the urgency of the story, Miller makes it vivid with odd detours and striking images. A gas burner when it’s turned on “shuddered into a crown of blue life;” a gutter is “toothed with icicles” and as Shona writes her story “the computer keys tapped like rain on a windowpane.” In some literary fiction, descriptive language takes the place of action, the focus zoomed in, substituting close observation for narrative flow. That’s not the case here – the evocative language is built into the energy and urgency of a story about the collapse of a society that has been leveled by the greed and hubris of extreme wealth.
The ancient soul of the island kingdom may be dead and forgotten as the past is paved over and rebuilt to cruder, crueler specifications, but we’re not left in a dead end of cynical despair. Shona will write her stories while she waits for something better to rise out of the ruins. And we will have the opportunity to catch a glimpse of a possible future to avoid in a beautifully written, thrilling novel.