The Hollow Tree by Philip Miller is atmospheric and intriguing

(Polygon, £9.99)

Coming two years after The Goldenacre, in which the authentication of a painting is linked to a series of murders, The Hollow Tree reintroduces Shona Sandison, whose investigative skills lead her down another rabbit hole – although this time, readers going in blind might be taken aback by how deep and how weird it gets.

Shona Sandison is a journalist, not a detective, and Miller’s novels revolve around the fact that she’s trying to get to the bottom of a story rather than bring a perpetrator to justice.

After being made redundant from the Edinburgh Post, she’s been freelancing for six months, living with her elderly father in a small Lochend flat. She’s always on the lookout for stories she can sell to the papers, but she doesn’t expect to see one unfold shockingly before her eyes.

Shona is at the wedding of former colleague Viv at a country house hotel near Dunoon, where she watches helplessly as one of the guests, a quiet man from the north of England, jumps naked from the battlements. There’s no obvious explanation for his suicide, but the tattoo on his chest and the cryptic words he utters before he jumps leave a trail that she can follow.

It’s only afterwards, with the wedding called off, that Shona learns that her old friend Viv used to have a brother, Andy, who went missing when he was 18 and has been presumed dead ever since, back in her County Durham hometown of Ullathorne.

The suicidal Dan was close friends with Andy. Travelling down to Ullathorne and teaming up with local photographer Terry, Shona discovers that they were part of a small group of sixth-formers in the early 1990s who got up to some activities prior to Andy’s disappearance that they’d still prefer not to talk about.

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One of those friends has since become Tory MP for the very Durham constituency in which he grew up. On the hard right of his party, Gary Watson is a toxic, Union flag-waving populist with a vision that harkens back to days of yore when bloodlines were pure, families were nuclear and Britannia ruled the waves.

He’s a thoroughly nasty piece of work, an ambitious cokehead with a taste for orgies and stabby henchmen. He’s clearly a sociopath, but might he actually be ... evil?

As Miller slowly but inexorably moves Shona closer to the villain of the piece, he imbues Ullathorne with a creepiness that hints of a dank, murky past, its extensive woods evoking death and decay rather than growth and vitality.

Assisted from a distance by the dandyish detective Reculver, resplendent in his mascara and beauty spots, Shona’s enquiries in Ullathorne take her places she never could have imagined the day she took the ferry to Dunoon, leading her towards esoteric theories about the nature of the soul and inscrutable occultist phrases that frequently crop up in Gary Watson’s campaign speeches.

Philip Miller's The Hollow Tree (Image: free)

For a protagonist, Shona comes across as a prickly, irritable character, her mistrustful nature most apparent when her father is hospitalised and she makes several pointed remarks to her dad’s new girlfriend, who is simply trying to do her best to care for the old man while his daughter is away. Still, we can admire Shona’s determination, and, fortunately, her new photographer friend and ally, Terry, gives as good as she gets.

Though it does leave behind it a nagging sense that several loose ends have been left hanging, The Hollow Tree is an atmospheric, intriguing crime thriller whose supernatural elements enable Miller, a former Herald arts writer, to leave his own distinctive mark on the genre.