AT the top of Campbell Hart's Twitter page is a photograph of a familiar Glasgow landmark looking somewhat the worse for wear.

It's one of the lions at the Cenotaph in George Square. It's bloodied and bruised.

The reason lies in the opening pages of Campbell's second novel, The Nationalist. An elderly man has just detonated a bomb during the packed Remembrance Day service at the Square, in November 2013.

The bomb causes carnage. The police begin an immediate manhunt for the suspect. The media's early reporting inflames speculation - but in the direction of the wrong people, which has its own consequences.

Campbell also throws in the political machinations within Police Scotland, a terror investigation being conducted amidst high-level pressure from the governments in Edinburgh and London, and a mischief-making website known as Newsnational.sco.

Said Campbell, 41: "What I wanted to depict was a country that was spinning out of control because of a single event.

"I know that some people might think that the idea of a terror attack on a Remembrance Day service will |seem far-fetched, but I hadn't long finished the first draft of the book when there were news reports that an alleged plot to bomb a Remembrance Day service in London had been uncovered.

"To transplant the accepted idea of a disparate Islamist threat with a fictional group of nationalists in Scotland didn't seem like a step too far, especially given the ferocity of debate around national identify which we all saw last year in the run-up to the Referendum.

"I've always been interested in the reaction to events, rather than just the events themselves, and this latest novel looks at the pressures between the state, the police, the media, and the public."

He was also amused to note that another part of his plot was seemingly echoed in real life.

"I was taken aback to read about the Faslane whistleblower recently," he said.

"You'll remember the reports - the Able Seaman who leaked secrets about security at the submarine base in Faslane.

"The similarity between that real-life case and my book was quite uncanny, as I wrote about a disgruntled naval officer who give out secret information, which is later used to pave the way for a terror attack on the facility.

"When I was growing up in Ayrshire in the 1980s, I seem to remember lots of talk about the nuclear threat.

"That was before the end of the Cold War, of course, but it's a subject that doesn't seem to get talked about so much these days.

"But the seaman's disclosures were quite dramatic and they brought it home to many Scots just what an arsenal Scotland has on its doorstep on the Clyde."

This is Campbell's second book. His first, Wilderness, took its cue from the freezingly cold winter of 2010 and introduced readers to DI John Arbogast, a cop with a troubled personal life.

Arbogast returns for The Nationalist an is also expected to feature in the final part of Campbell's trilogy, Referendum.

Campbell himself worked with a Glasgow-based PR company for four years but recently left to concentrate on the new book.

Prior to that, he had worked as a journalist for a decade with BBC Scotland and other organisations, before moving into PR at the Big Lottery Fund then Oxfam.

He said: "In the last few weeks the only thing anyone's really been talking about has been nationalism. And I don't just mean the SNP - when we're talking about UK identity and ditching the Human Rights Act you know something big is going on.

"I'm interested in how this all fits into Scotland right now and the new book questions the political and personal reasons for reacting in a certain way and with a specific agenda.

"The kind of questions I'm asking are - Should the response to a terror threat be less freedom?

"What is the impact on British life of the competing agendas of different parliaments? What do soldiers think of national identity when they may have split loyalties?

"What's the logical conclusion of a group of war-hardened militants who desperately want what they haven't got - independence? Whatever way you look at it, we've got a lot to talk about right now."

He says that although The Nationalist is set in the run up to the independence vote, the issues it deals with are being highlighted on a grand scale at this very moment.

"How the new UK Government reacts to the new Scottish SNP majority will be interesting," he adds.

"My next book, Referendum, which will be published next year, will look at the lives of ordinary people ahead of last year's big vote.

"The reasons for people living in poverty are just as true in 2015 as they were last year, and with another big election on the horizon it will be interesting to see what happens next."

If the Nationalist is any yardstick, the last part of the trilogy should be just as explosive.

* On the web: crimewriter2000.wordpress.com. Twitter @elharto. The Nationalist is available from Amazon in paperback and e-book.