Plot: a man imprisoned for crimes against young girls (hence the title, eventually) carries on a correspondence with a suburban teenager who, she gradually reveals, has fixated not only on the gaoled man, but also a young boy in the neighbourhood. Her perverse sexual pursuit is insinuating and, ultimately, graphic.

Homes calculates her shocks, but most readers will find them either tedious or just plain unpleasant: "She licks the knee, the scab, to soften it, to wash it and ready it. The flavour is wondrous"; "He fucks me and then drops to his knees, buries his head in my ass, and starts to suck my blood/his cum." Homes' psychological insight is shallow, her transgression amateurish, as if being a woman writing about a predatory girl is somehow enough. That the NSPCC's Jim Harding found it "the most vile and perverted novel I've ever read" is testament to a sheltered life.

Once in a while you might get to wondering if any or all of this tawdry tale is true, but never so much that you actually care. Maybe the girl exists or maybe she is simply a projection of a perversely fevered imagination. And maybe as readers we could care less. There is no attempt to make us identify, and that is not because of some crafty amoral trick on the author's part so much as a lack of engagement between the author and her book. Reading between the lines you can see that she doesn't really care, so how can we be expected to?

It's a shame, because Homes can clearly write - albeit in the po-faced U.S. writing school manner beloved of Bret Easton Ellis. It's written to please a professor, not general readers; too well for pornography, not well enough for literature. And where you could argue that there is no place for humour in a book like this, equally I can argue that, without it, reaching the end is more chore than pleasure.

Should this stodgy, nasty, loveless little book be banned? Of course not. Will it be remembered - let alone read - in six months time? What do you think?