Meet the Author: Fallen Angel writer Chris Brookmyre

It has all the hallmarks of a high profile, true-life crime; a successful family on holiday in Portugal, the chilling and mysterious loss of a child, and the suspicion and conspiracy theories that follow.

But award-winning Scots crime writer Chris Brookmyre says echoes of the Madeleine McCann case in his latest novel Fallen Angel came purely by chance. Having surfaced, though, he decided to tackle them “head on”.

Three-year-old Madeleine was taken from her bed in a holiday apartment in the country almost 12 years ago. Her doctor mum, Kate – who trained in Dundee – and her Glasgow-born cardiologist dad, Gerry, were out with friends at the time.

Chris, who lives in Bothwell with his doctor-turned-author wife Marisa and their 19-year-old student son Jack, tells P.S.: “The genus of the journey into the story of any novel is never quite what it looks like when it is done.

“Fallen Angel started with a simple idea of someone going missing in an airport but after a lot of discussion with my wife in evolving the story, it became about family, toxic parenting and a child drowning on holiday.”

And, although not about a missing child, he says: “Unavoidably it does allude to that because it is partly looking at how the media and individuals respond to that kind of story.

“Part of me was thinking that if you have an idea for a story of a crime involving a child you can’t relate all of those things always to the McCann case. But in this case I thought I had better address it head on and make it part of the story. I felt it was important to talk about the conspiracy theories people develop.

“It’s about social media and the fake news era and people’s tendency to construct their own narrative of whatever has happened. I wanted to think about what the impact of that would be if you were a family in the public eye and were the subject of those kind of speculations.”

And the former journalist, whose Jack Parlabane novels have sold more than one million copies in the UK, and who with his wife pens a highly successful historical crime series under the pseudonym Ambrose Parry, adds: “We went on holiday with our son from the age of two onwards – children have that amazing ability to go haring towards danger in the blink of an eye. I was just conscious of that fear we always have, and wanted to tap into that.

“But the book is largely about bad parenting and the sexist assumptions that women are going to be drawn naturally towards motherhood whether they are cut out for it or not. I wanted to look at the role of motherhood and how we understand it.”

Chris Brookmyre Fallen Angel, Little, Brown, £18.99