Jonathan Coe’s latest book turns out to be a bag of tricks, but it starts sedately enough. Phyl, a recent English graduate, is back living with her parents, Joanna and Andrew, making puns about ‘parochial’ vicars and contemplating writing a cosy crime novel (‘It would be like writing a student essay: all you had to do was to make sure that you … followed the agreed formula’). An old university friend of her mother, the campaigning journalist Christopher Swann, comes to visit with his adopted daughter, Rashida, who quickly becomes Phyl’s collaborator. 

The novel is set during Liz Truss’s brief turn as prime minister. Swann, who writes a blog about the radicalisation of the Conservative Party, believes he has uncovered a secret plot to privatise the NHS. The plotter-in-chief is one Roger Wagstaff, a right-wing lobbyist who happens to have been at Cambridge with Swann and Joanna in the 1980s. Wagstaff’s sinister organisation, the Processus Group, is holding a ‘TrueCon’ conference at Wetherby Hall, a house in the Cotswolds. Swann decides to attend and confront Wagstaff but tells his hosts he has a funny feeling that something bad is going to happen to him there. Is Swann a fantasist or does Wagstaff really have that much to lose?

Here, then, is the perfect scenario for Phyl’s murder mystery. But, as Phyl explains to Rashida, crime isn’t the only genre that sells. There’s also autofiction and Phyl’s own favourite, ‘dark academia’: ‘you know… novels about university students … forming themselves into friendship groups and getting involved with secret societies