'Well, not quite everyone. Some people hate me. What about that awful magazine that called me "Queen of Crap"?'

Emma Cave's The Lair is a sorry excuse for a novel, its catatonic pace only pointing up the insufferably twee middle-classness that nags at the book like a bad toothache. Being kind we might label these shop dummies as characters, but seldom have the idle rich been so defined through their outlandish names - Rupert Deyntree, Disa Trapani and, spare us, Dink November - and what they stuff into their mouths. It's Masterchef with a murder.

The plot, such as it is, has the much married Rupert, a bounder and a cad if ever we saw one, meet wannabe sexy sophisticate Disa - "I go for danger. For living on the edge" - for a bout of exotic island-bound coitus. Back in England, annoying Yankee busybody Vee is worried about drippy best pal Lucy, herself abandoned bare-foot and pregnant by the dastardly Rupe. There's some shenanigans about stolen videocassettes, a lucky bag of -isms (lesbian, alcohol), and a murdered prostitute, but by that time you'll be well adrift in the land of nod.

The whole is finally brought down by a singular lack of sympathy for any and all of its participants. The novel's idea of decadence and depravity is pure Daily Mail - the Romans, the Holocaust, snuff videos - and its want for a backbone, as it pussyfoots around the icky stuff, supplants any residual revulsion with unalloyed cowardice. It's hard to react when we are given nothing to react against, and after a while you do start and wonder if it's not all just some spectacularly banal in-joke.

And insult to injury, Cave pens dialogue so pedantic it's exhausting, hysterically laced with 'clever' quotation; all those inverted commas start and feel like an embarrassing rash:

'Quoting!' She laughed again. 'Stuff! You quote that stuff a lot.'

'I know. It's old fashioned - but I can't get rid of the habit.'

If this schlock is ever filmed it'll be as a BBC1 Sunday schedule filler 'starring' Nigel Havers. The horror, the horror...