A retired teacher from Paisley has brought the rolling tide of independence movements to the shores of Shetland.
John McDougall has just followed up on his previous five-star novels with a highly-polished political thriller, Their Woman in Lerwick.
Heavily influenced by the Brexit debacle, the Glasgow University classics graduate has spun together a cautionary tale of extremist nationalism.
He says: “I have always seen nationalism as a force that can narrow the horizons of an individual or a population, and certainly can be, as history has shown, dangerous or downright destructive.
“I wondered, then, if the UK can leave the EU, and Scotland can leave the UK – as it may yet – how far can nationalism go?
“Could Shetland, for example, choose under certain circumstances to leave Scotland?”
Their Woman in Lerwick is a masterful spy thriller in which two very independent women, Carol Rutherford and Pamela Grey, are tasked with infiltrating and disrupting the Free Shetland movement.
They may play differing roles in their attempts to foil the freedom-fighting islanders, but they are both driven by an overwhelming desire for power – a desire that poisons their every relationship.
Born and raised in Paisley, without a television in the home, John relied heavily on books for his childhood entertainment. Although he lost himself in writers like Charles Dickens, John Buchan and Frederick Forsyth, it was Graham Greene who fired most his imagination.
And, in many ways, Their Woman in Lerwick pays homage to the author of Our Man in Havana – except for the gender of the protagonists.
The father-of-two added: “The one person who most inspired me to write was Graham Greene, because I loved the way he transported me to places, physical and psychological, where I had never been before.
“I felt, however, that he never fleshed out his female characters and I set myself a challenge, which might sound arrogant: could I do better than that?”
John enjoys his retirement in Argyll with his wife where, when not writing, he climbs, swims and grows oaklings.
Since leaving the teaching profession he has travelled extensively across much of southeast Asia, which provided the material for his earlier novels, The Towers of Hanoi, The Mekong Trap, and The Angkor Plot.
For more details, visit Amazon, www.amazon.co.uk/John-McDougall where the paperback and Kindle formats of Their Woman in Lerwick are both available.