Jenny Warner is a lowly thirtysomething assistant at Norfolk nursing home Middleton Hall. She has several residents under her care but her attentions are monopolised by Stella, a well-spoken good-dresser dying from cancer. Before she dies - this is a Vine novel, after all - Stella has a secret to impart, truths to be told about a past and a tragic affair no one around her, not least her grown-up children, suspects.

Nothing inherently wrong, excepting that in Jenny the author has conceived a curious hybrid. Part archetypal Vineian narrator, part working-class, self-confessed "ignorant". The tension created between the two, rather than spicing the novel, tends rather to throw us off. Against it the narrative has to work too hard to be heard. Curiously, we miss the pompous middle-class erudition of the earlier work.

There is more narrative here too, a characteristic Vine conceit of contrasting Stella's old-worldly ways (if the 60s and early 70s count as such) with Jenny's own affair with Ned Saraman, a deliberately vaguely drawn, well-educated TV producer. Vine's methods (and the thing that contrasts these books with her less salubrious work as Ruth Rendell) is a concern with the pull of the past on the present, ways in which nothing is ever really forgotten. It's just that here her methods are more LEGO brick than delicate tapestry.

That's not to take away from The Brimstone Wedding a number of notables, however. There are Jenny's top-heavy superstitions that stoke her fears: red flowers, green clothes, verses for "rhyming away mice". Stella's flit around the edges of the British film industry immediately after the war through an uneasy friendship with mysteriously vanished starlet Gilda Brent. And then there is the truly spectacular grand guignol climax, larded with grisly detail and psychological torture.

Too often though, and noticeably more so than before, too much of this is told to us, the final device (a sequence of posthumous cassettes) lazy and contrived. Ultimately, and for all it has some dazzling moments, the novel never touches on the bleak melancholy of a book like No Night is Too Long or the numbing detail of Asta's Book. It's a misfire rather than an outright disaster, but, for Vine, a disappointment all the same.