If that sounds like the set-up from a Geoff Nicholson novel (and let's face it, it does), then stylistically A Closed Book could scarcely be more different. It's told entirely (almost entirely) in dialogue. Imagine a radio drama with two players; everyone else - what few there are - relegated to a supporting role. Sir Paul's blindness is a flourish that allows Adair both to alchemise description into spoken-word, and to play with notions of truth, proof and guilt. It allows Adair not only to write his story but effectively comment on the text as he goes. Imagine if you will that modern staple, the unreliable narrator, when there effectively is no narrator. It's a trick, but one he pulls off with no little aplomb.

At least, until Adair loses his nerve in the last fifty pages. It's as though, having established Ryder's untrustworthiness and the blindman's vulnerability, he has desperately to search for some way of turning the tables. He does, and it makes a clumsy kind of sense, but never feels like anything more than a bolt-on accessory. The book offers us the same grisly 'twist' that wearily wends its way through seemingly half the books published these days. (No, I'm not saying what.) Wit and word-play like this demand something more subtle than they get; Adair cannot seduce us, then turn girlishly coy.