The first mystery in Antonia Fraser's detective novel, Cool Repentance, is why it is not set in Ireland. The characters give off such a strong whiff of decadent Anglo-Irish flesh that it seems perverse to have located them somewhere in rural-England-by-the-sea. Anyway, despite the eccentricity of the setting, it starts off excellently.

Christobel Herrick, whose fate is at the centre of the novel, is a prematurely retired famous actress about to be enticed back on stage by an ambitious, pseudish director…. She has recently returned to her husband's home after a protracted desertion of a humiliating kind: she had run off with the stable boy, the son of the domestic servants of the house. The stable boy had used her as a stepping-stone to becoming a pop star, ruined her career, then deserted her, only to die in a motorbicycle crash. Christobel has now returned to resume her...