The Deepfake Widow: Reality is Only a Deepfake Away — Paperback

Description

A Glasgow DI hunts a killer who stages murders as memes—and discovers the audience is paying to watch.
When Kylie McKendrick is found on the Clyde with a diamond-encrusted USB in her mouth, DI Midge Rutherford knows this isn’t a random killing. The staging is deliberate, cinematic—a message meant to be photographed and shared. The case spirals when Midge discovers the dead actress’s face was stolen for a royal deepfake, viewed millions of times, and reported to police—who sent her a leaflet and closed the file.
As bodies multiply—each posed as a viral image, each with a diamond USB—Midge uncovers a subscription-based platform where users pay for exclusive access to the murders. The killer is a showrunner, the victims are “content,” and the audience is the engine. But the investigation is compromised: a senior officer is on the subscriber list, feeding operational intel to the killer.
With a seventeen-year-old hacker as her only ally, Midge races to stop the next episode before it streams live. But every piece of evidence they gather is legally poisoned, and the killer has designed the platform to survive any takedown. The Deepfake Widow is a razor-sharp thriller about justice, spectacle, and the price of attention in a world that never looks away.