Professor of Architecture Barry Maitland wants it all ways round, it seems. He's cooking up a jar of Thomas Harris here, a few loose Prime Suspect procedurals there, spiced with a sprig of Morse, a soupcon of Jacobean revengers tragedy for garnish.

For her third outing, the ridiculously monikered Kathy Kolla has moved up to Scotland Yard, Serious Crimes Branch under the inscrutable Chief Inspector Brock. And what better way to toast promotion than a meaty murder mystery? An unremarkable young office girl has been grotesquely butchered in her parents' politely middle-class suburban home. Could the faceless corpse be the latest in a strand of crimes against young women over recent months?

Quickly the police have a suspect in Tom Gentle, an arrogant co-worker with a fetish for elicit photography. But Gentle was out of the country, so how could he have done it all? And why do the outrages appear thematically reliant on the productions of a local am-dram and their strangely sinister guru?

Against all odds All My Enemies makes for a unexpectedly sharp read. Maitland's alternating between whodunit and whydunit is deft, even playful, and keeps the reader-mind off his markedly lax characterisation. Only Kathy has any real depth, the remainder - and the would-be enigmatic Brock in particular - pieces merely there to be moved through an elaborately plotted game.

But thankfully it's one worth playing, its end absurd and convoluted, certainly, but satisfying and thorough all the same. Our pulses are set racing by the page three mention of brilliant cinematic competitor Peter Greenaway, but the book never quite attains such heights. Instead Maitland is content to dabble with the insidious myth of imitative violence by patterning his misdemeanours after a corpus of theatrical stagings - Macbeth, Equus, The Lady Vanishes and, spectacularly, Barefoot In The Park. The book is conceived with a welcome measure of tongue-in-cheek to lighten its undeniably grisly load. All My Enemies is better than it has any right to be. *** 1/2