“Former detective Tom Potter encounters a woman he investigated as a missing child ten years ago, recognising the gold defect in her eye from the photograph on the case file. Potter is aghast that Blair Gray is alive because he arrested and convicted a man for her murder.
While trying to figure out what happened to the girl, Potter is called to assist with a triple homicide at a campsite in Scotland’s Galloway Forest Park. When an oil company is subsequently attacked by eco-zealots, Potter wonders if there is a link to the slaughtered tourists.
Potter’s inquiries take him to the headquarters of South African Sylvester Kriel, the charismatic leader of an environmental lobby group. Suspecting Kriel’s organization is not all it seems, Potter unearths a trail that leads back to his decade-old case and the man he sent to prison.”
I devised a psychology experiment once. Nothing fancy and lacking clinical rigour, it was little more than a silly prank, but it was nevertheless intriguing. I used to train probationary constables in my role as a police instructor, and I wondered if I could influence them to do something daft without an explanation. It turned out I could.
I would interrupt my lesson, take the students outside the classroom, and get them to line up one behind the other facing a flagpole. I asked them to place one hand on the shoulder of the person in front, and then salute the flag with the other on the count of three. On the way back inside, I made them turn to each other and say: “Unity!”
I ran the experiment about half a dozen times. Only once did an individual refuse to take part because, well, it was so obviously a stupid thing to do. When I asked my students why they complied, they said it was because I was the trainer and I’d told them to do it. And they were trainee police officers, not children. They’d acquiesced willingly.
My idea had come from Stanley Milgram’s famous obedience to authority experiment. That was a while ago, but events during recent years – idiotic pandemic rules and climate hysteria especially – made me look again at psychological manipulation by people in positions of power. And I was particularly interested in cult behaviour.
Reading Jeffrey Deaver’s THE GOODBYE MAN reminded me that I’d always intended to write a cult thriller. I read works by Steven Hassan and Leon Festinger to learn about the subject and discard my preconceptions. The rise of militant eco-activism provided the perfect subject matter for my story. See my blog post for more on this topic.
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