Oh god, not more Davidson. The first one was OK, the second was bad. Both had dislikeable protagonists; the second also suffered from overwrought writing. How bad would this be?

Not terrible; not great. It’s written with more restraint, so that’s one thing. Another thing is that it solves the protagonist issue by not really having one. There’s a trio of characters—a detective, a journalist, and a film-maker—who share more or less equal billing, and we get occasional interjections from the supporting cast. A serial killer is at work in Chelsea; the detective and the journalist are after them, and the film-maker is one of a few central suspects, along with some of his friends and associates.

The story ticks along well enough, with a few nice scenes, and seems to hang together, but in the end I don’t think it can really decide what it wants to be. It’s thriller-ish in tone, at least in parts, but never really leans into the gore and horror of the serial killer. It has trappings of a whodunnit, clues and riddles and all, but then kind of switches two thirds through to a howdunnit as the identity of the killer becomes obvious. There are red herrings so stinking that you might wonder if this was the point, to undermine the tropes of several crime subgenres at once, but the book doesn’t seem clever enough for that. There’s a half-hearted thematic concern with the clash between the staid world of the police and the louche, bohemian culture of art-school Chelsea, but this never comes into focus. It doesn’t help that Davidson hadn’t lived in London (indeed for the UK) for a while, and so his late-70s Chelsea is mostly populated by vaguely hippy types left over from the 1960s—not a punk in sight. The wrap-up is something of a damp squib. Oh, and there’s some terrible racially stereotyped characters. It is, at least, short. It passed the time well enough and didn’t actively annoy me, so I guess it’s better than the last two Davidsons, but thank god there’s no more.