'No man knows what evil lurks in the secret heart of men. But the Shadow Knows.' So I am told by an American friend, a Valentine Dyall-like voice informed the Americans before every episode of a radio serial. The Shadow was a mastermind, a super-detective, anonymous, ubiquitous. The claim of the mystery-voice is, in itself, ambiguous. So, I take it, is Diane Johnson's novel, which is a cunning cross between the intensely articulate plaint of the under-extended intelligent woman and a conventional mystery, shading into a psychological horror-story….

N. [the narrator], for all her sympathy with, and intermittent admiration of, herself, is a chilly and rebarbative creature. A good feminist might say she was a typical product of a way of life she is feebly trying to rebut. Horrified by housework, blinded by smeary fingers of entirely uncharacterised children on her glasses, she takes to transformational grammar...