A child's body was found beneath a rose bed in Broad Woodham. The house belongs to an ageing woman who calls herself Jean, but is actually Soviet-born Yevgenia Chornorouskya. The corpse is little more than a pile of bones and a bashed-in skull of indeterminate age but mournful local lawman Stevens figures it for the body of a small boy missing for over thirty years.

Into this sedate brew of manners and tea parties Ironside tosses a catalyst in the shape of visiting Russian teenager Xenia, there to stir-up dark thoughts of Yevgenia's homeland in a stew of regret and obligation that will inevitably have serious repercussions for the future.

Jean's pal Zita holds our hand, but her sleuthing is as polite and un-urgent as everything else between these covers.

Problematically, it's hard to care too much when the biggest crisis most of this cast will ever face is inheritance tax. But at least Ironside writes well enough to engage our intelligence, and Zita, despite a naggingly irrelevant disabled son (thrown in, one presupposes, to render her slightly less privileged), is pleasingly bland. The odd occasions when the real world invades do feel a tad cloth cap and whippet.

Mind you, after 425 pages of such decorous stuff you may well be left hankering after crimes of a more substantial bent, the novel's accomplishments often having more to do with what it's not than what it is. But given that Brit-crime of late has served up two of the worst books in living memory (Nicolas Blincoe and Paul Charles, you know who you are), The Accomplice comes out smelling rather fresher than that it probably deserves. ** 1/2