This is a less successful retread of the last Walters winner. So much is similar. Location: village Dorset. Situation: rich family, disliked, finds itself in bother and besailed by scurrilous rumour propagated by unpleasant locals. Atmosphere: brooding Gothic. Cast: Aforementioned rich family, aforementioned unpleasant locals, mysterious wrong’uns hanging round ominously, interloping outsider woman bravely occupying stereotypically masculine role. Plot: what exactly are the rich family’s secrets, did they lead to murder, what exactly do the wrong’uns want?

Nothing wrong with sticking to what works, of course, but the trouble here is that everything in the formula is done just a bit too much—like an exaggerated pastiche. The unpleasant gossiping locals are more unpleasant, with fewer redeeming features or complexities. The rich family are more innocent, more noble, more victimised. The main wrong’un is a comic-book villain. The brave woman is even less feminine, even more competent, and even more in irritating need of rescue by a man at crucial junctures.

The most unsuccessful amplification of the formula is thematic. I didn’t mention it in the last Walters review, but that book had a symbolic theme of flowers running through it, from epigraph to plot details to allusions. This book also has a theme: foxes. And it lays it on so thick you start to suffer from semantic satiation, or perhaps thematic satiation. The main rich person is called Colonel Lockyer-Fox. He sometimes communicates using Aesopean fables starring the lion, the ass, and the fox. There’s also one of those as an epigraph. The main wrong’un is called Fox Evil (really), partly in reference to his alopecia, which is (we’re told in the epigraphs, twice) sometimes called “fox evil” or “fox mange”. Fox Evil has a habit of killing foxes and keeping their tails, which Lockyer-Fox dislikes, as his late wife liked foxes. Meanwhile, there’s a fox-hunters vs saboteurs sub-plot that doesn’t really come to much, but keeps the foxes in view. People occasionally give “fox-like” smiles. There’s a used bookshop in the village that only stocks books described as “slightly foxed”. Fox fox fox fox fox. Alright, I made up the bookshop, but the rest is all there. Essentially every aspect of this book needed dialling down a couple of notches and then it would perhaps been pretty good, instead of OK.