The story unfolds at a fairly slow pace as we slowly learn more and more about Jean’s life, often through her recounting her story and Robert travelling to meet people she shared her life with, sometimes through swapping to the perspectives of the people involved in Jean’s story or Jean herself.

Trevor Royle speaks with Magnus Linklater at the Edinburgh International Book Festival While Scotland has been free of major military conflict since the 1940s, it could have been different had the Cold War escalated. Set in 1817 Glasgow, and based on the real-life case of Jean Campbell, a young deaf woman, accused of infanticide. I deliberately decided not to find out what happened in the real case so that I was in the dark as to the outcome and anxiously waiting to see if justice would be done. There are, she has written, hardly any deaf users of sign language in fiction, and the few that there are ‘range from the patronising to the absurd; childlike victims who are “rescued” by the hearing protagonist, or one-dimensional characters whose lack of hearing is used simply as a device to move the plot forward’. We also get a character who very much represents the “giftedly disabled” stance, which is extremely weird to me, but I know it existed and still exists.I loved the settings, particularly the incredibly atmospheric opening which really set the scene for the rest of the novel. Hear No Evil is a gripping novel which brings both early 19th century Edinburgh and Glasgow evocatively to life. Add the alleged crime of child murder and the fact the suspect is deaf, and you have a great and complex subject to reveal.

To have two such sympathetic characters as Jean Campbell and Robert Kinniburgh at its heart and for there to be such a tense edge to the story all the way through is a real achievement. Soon after her arrest, the Glasgow police discovered their prisoner was deaf, could not speak and thus could not tell her side of the story. As Robert gains her trust, Jean confides in him, and Robert begins to uncover the truth, moving uneasily from interpreter to investigator, determined to clear her name before it is too late. Jean has many friends and protectors who would rally around her but how do they convey her character and intellect when she herself cannot communicate it without an interpreter? It is a perfect mix of fact, atmospheric setting, strong characters and an understanding of what life was like for someone with a disability in the early 19th Century.I found the history around the “deaf and dumb” societies and schools fascinating and it has helped fill in a lot of my ignorance around the subject. For me, however, the most interesting element of the novel was when it was dealing with Jean's deafness and the prejudices deaf people faced and to some extent still do today. A treat for lovers of historical fiction, the book will have a wide appeal to all readers - a good thing when the message at its core is so important and relevant to our own times. It seems that we can revere them as Paralympians or military heroes, but many don’t pass the time of day with real people with disabilities in their daily life.