Malicious fake videos at heart of new psychological thriller

You look at stories and videos online. How on earth do you know what is real and what isn’t?

That’s the starting point for Just One Bite, the latest book from Steyning-based psychological thriller writer Miranda Rijks – an idea which came to her just as she was watching MasterChef. The two things converged.

In the book, celebrity chef Brittany Cole has it all. Fame, success, and the perfect family. From her restored Vermont farmhouse, she’s built a wholesome brand that is trusted by millions.

But when her four-year-old has a meltdown, a video of Brittany shouting at the little girl goes viral. It’s a PR nightmare that threatens to destroy Brittany’s squeaky-clean image – and her career.

But it’s about to get so much worse. More videos of Brittany abusing her daughter are released and #bitchmom trends within hours. But Brittany knows something truly terrifying: none of these new videos are real. Someone out there is trying to destroy her with deepfakes. Someone who has been watching her home, her studio and her marriage.

As more damning videos surface, Brittany’s perfect life unravels. Her sponsors flee. Her husband files for divorce. And then, when someone close to her is murdered, the police start asking questions Brittany can’t answer.

“It just feels so current,” Miranda says. “You look at social media and you look at the news or YouTube and you just can't tell what is real and what isn't. You look at some deepfake videos and they're obviously deepfake but you don't know and so I just started to think how I could make that work as a psychological thriller.

“Most of my readers would be 30 to 60-year-old women and they wouldn't necessarily understand how it all works and so probably think of it all in quite a fearful way. And in a very mean kind of way my job is to tap into that fear for the reader. It is also therapeutic for me. I don't need therapy because I write psychological thrillers!”

The book comes out on June 28.

Miranda was brought up in Sussex, between Horsham and Billingshurst and moved away for university, worked in Eastern Europe and lived in the Peak District before moving back to Sussex.

Her writing career took off after she recovered from Ewing sarcoma, a rare form of bone cancer. She turned to writing fiction in 2019 following a year’s worth of chemo and the removal and replacement of her femur. What started as a deeply personal creative outlet has evolved into a prolific career, with twenty-nine psychological thrillers published and most hitting Amazon’s bestseller lists.

“I had to be treated in London. It was all quite dramatic. It was all pretty hard, to say the least.

“I had been writing for years. My first book was a non-fiction published by Bloomsbury in 1999 and then I wrote a biography and then I did a masters in writing. I was working alongside all of this and I had written a couple of fiction books but you have to be very brave to put fiction out there. At least with non-fiction you can pitch it a bit like a business plan but I didn't think I was brave enough to go for non-fiction. The constant rejections are hard.

“And then I was diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma which was extremely rare in a 48-year-old woman. That was quite a shock. I'd had significant pain for three years beforehand. It is extremely difficult to treat because the treatment they give to the sarcoma has not changed for decades. They basically kill you with chemo and hope that you survive and I nearly didn't on many an occasion.

“The writing came back when I recovered from that. I had read quite a lot of fiction about cancer and it had always had negative outcomes. I wanted to write something with a positive outcome. I decided to write something that would be cathartic for me, and so I wrote Don't Call Me Brave. I feel quite strongly about that. People with cancer are called brave but really you have no choice. You just have to get through it.”

And the fiction continued from there, particularly after she was approached by Inkubator Books: “I have had a phenomenal relationship with them.”