A Coat of Varnish is a murder story of unusual power though it has limitations at the 'whodunnit' level. In a low-key and slow-paced approach, the process of solving the mystery is secondary to the author's characteristic preoccupations with conflicts between ambition and conscience; with primitive feelings that underlie the veneer of civilisation; with resonances between people, or between an individual's inner experiences and the externals that he observes.

The setting is London in the long summer drought of 1976. The oppressive physical atmosphere and its parallel psychological mood are accurately recreated. They make an appropriate backcloth for the brutal and apparently motiveless murder of the ageing Lady Ashbrook at her Belgravia home. The ugliness of the killing prompts one of the characters to remark that civilisation is 'hideously fragile' with little 'between us and the horrors underneath. Just about a coat of varnish.'

Yet despite the sense of angst that occasionally penetrates the narrative, there is an overall feeling of well-being; the leading characters move in a world of affluence, of cultured conversation and comfortable dinner-parties where they don't have to worry about who is going to do the washing-up afterwards. Even if the civilised structure which protects them is deeply