It’s all Sarah Lund’s fault. Without the example of Danish TV series The Killing Glasgow-born crime writer Louise Millar might never have got around to setting her latest book in Scotland.

Millar, 50, had written three crime novels set in and around Oxford, Suffolk and north London, which is where she now lives with her Scottish teacher husband Andy and their two girls. But it took the example of Nordic noir to make her think she could set her latest novel City of Strangers closer to home.

“I watched a lot of Scandinavian telly and I love Icelandic thrillers,” Millar explains, “and we travelled there for a couple of summers. We drove about 3000 miles around Norway, Sweden and Denmark and I’ve been to Finland and Iceland. I just felt such an affinity with that part of the world and I stared to realise that it was because a lot of it reminded me of Scotland.”

“It was everything from the lakes and the lochs, the fact that large parts of it are quite remote, the isolated communities, the long summers, the dark winters. I started to write a book set in that landscape and then I thought ‘this is silly. I should just write a book set in Scotland.’”

Her new book City of Strangers asks the question, what you would do if you returned from your honeymoon to find a dead man in your house? Millar’s heroine Grace Scott decides to find out who the man is. It’s a journey that takes her from Edinburgh all around Europe and into real danger.

Millar’s own journalistic career has rarely been quite so dramatic. She spent two decades working on music magazines including Kerrang, Smash Hits and the NME before getting a job with the women’s magazine Marie Claire.

But while no dead bodies turned up on the patio she did spend five years speaking to both victims and perpetrators of crime for the magazine. “I interviewed people who had killed other people,” she explains. “But most of the people had survived crimes and wanted to talk about it. They wanted to spread a message or inform other women.

“It was very interesting because you weren’t talking to them just after a crime had happened or outside the court. You were talking to them maybe three years later and at that point they’d processed a lot. You were hearing about the effects of psychological abuse and crime and how they survived it.”

That information has fed into her books. “I like to create situations where people are under threat and then explore how you get yourself out of that, how you survive that.”

Her first book Playdate examined parental fears and anxieties. “It’s about a woman who trusts the wrong woman with her child,” Millar explains. “I think generally people write about violence because they want to explore their fears. And the reader reads them because they want to explore those fears with the writer and then feel reassured at the end.”

Millar, who’s originally from Waterfoot on the edge of Glasgow agrees that crime fiction has never been more popular than now. And she wonders if it isn’t all to do with the fact that we are all living more frantic lives now than ever before. “We know there are a lot more anxiety disorders. People are working much longer hours because they’re on Twitter and emailing work at 11pm.

“There is a scene in The Playdate that people seem to really engage with. My character is trying to get home. Her daughter’s afterschool club shuts at six and it’s ten to six and she can’t get off the tube. And she looks around the carriage and all the people – not just women but men as well – are going ‘got to get home’. I think that’s a common experience for a lot of people.”

But there must be times when she wants to get away from all the violence, even if it is only fictional. What does she do to escape? Well, it turns out, she escapes. “We go to remote wild places. My husband is very much an outdoors person so he encouraged me strongly into wilderness camping in Utah and Arizona. I was absolutely petrified at first but I became addicted to it.

“I think it’s because everything drops away. After a couple of days all you start thinking about it is ‘do we have water? Can we make a fire?’ I think that’s a good thing to get in touch with occasionally.”

City of Strangers by Louise Millar is published by MacMillan, priced £12.99.