Paris. There's a war on. The place crawls with the Occupier's shocktroops. But somewhere within it all a semblance of normality survives. And that includes the city's thieves and killers.

A Sandman stalks these streets, taking it upon himself to molest and slay young girls with a knitting needle. As we arrive, a fifth corpse has surfaced, leaving the victim's friend and their teenage escort missing. The latter soon fetches-up dead after a clumsy back-street abortion, but it falls to our two rather unmemorable detectives to trace heiress Nenette Vernet and unmask the Sandman before a sixth dies.

Unfortunately, for all the evident detail, Janes makes little of the setting, his novel never building the sense of encompassing evil it needs. Nor does it make us value a single life amidst the millions wasted in the world just beyond its borders - and certainly not one as ghastly as the precocious Nenette.

Because of that, Sandman chalks up as not much more than an efficient, slightly exotic, but rather old-fashioned procedural. And granted neither its subject nor the city are exactly a bundle of laughs, but you'll search in vain for anything like a lighter tone. As such, although we set out with high hopes of Janes doing for Paris what Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir does for the Nazi capital, a grim siege mentality sets in long before the end. Janes is eminently capable, but the lack of ambition evidenced here - like the inappropriately lurid cover - is dispiriting.