It's easy - too easy perhaps - to think of any novel about the weight of the past on the present as being, if you will, Vineian, but Ms. Rendell's alter-ego is clearly all over Thomas H. Cook's latest like a rash. The unlikely named Henry Griswald narrates, looking back from ageing bachelorhood upon the events of 1926, when terrible doings overcame the New England school his father headmastered.

At their centre, Ms. Channing, the shapely new art teacher and worldly wise traveller who lived in a small cottage adjacent to the ominously christened Black Pond. In fellow teacher Leland Reed, a married man with a young daughter, she sparked a fierce flame that could be quenched by tragedy alone.

Cook knows there is a degree of familiarity, if not cliché, in all of this and wisely elects to play to his strengths. From page one he skilfully evokes the foetid, buttoned-down climate of Chatham and Black Pond, darkly hinting again and again that Henry knows where the bodies are buried. And why. We know of the crowded courthouse photograph and the scrawled legend: hang her.

And the book delivers. Cook gives up his secrets slowly, deliberately, saving a not unexpected but still chilling biggie for the denouement. He's shooting for a sweet, heavy, "furious" melancholy and, in reining in his ambition, hits the target four-square every time. Sensibly he doesn't fully elaborate on the desire between Channing and Reed, leaving a certain useful ambiguity to the heart; the restraint of the period is as important a factor in this equation as the obvious passion and resentment. Life, agrees this slightly too knowing go-between, is best lived at the edge of folly. That he knows this and, even after these events, fails to act gives the book a grim vitality.

Less happily, Chatham itself is little more than an excuse to bring these characters together rather than central to the intrigue. The pupils supposedly educated here - and Henry himself is, after all, one of them - are scarcely even mentioned.

Laughably one cover-blurb has Cook "constantly pushing against the limits of crime fiction", which is to do him an injustice. Rather, The Chatham School Affair (dreadful title, incidentally) is decent, solid genre fare. You really could do a lot lot worse.

***1/2