You know that thing about Chaos Theory, about a butterfly flexing its wings in one part of the world invoking a hurricane right around the other side? The moth gracing the cover of Barbara Vine's newest has something chaotic about it. Not hurricanes mind, not unless it's those small emotional ones that blow through the middle-English lives these elegant novels so acutely describe. Chaos Theory as parlour game.

Certainly The Chimney Sweeper's Boy is a book about consequences. Time and again characters reflect on how insignificant incidents inflate to engulf and even destroy lives. Like Ursula Candless, widow of popular erstwhile Booker nominee Gerald. They only met because some ice slipped-up a scheduled speaker. Now Gerald is no more and she is relieved. Not so much because she had to secretly nurse him through the final months, keeping the gravity of the situation from his successful and devoted thirtysomething daughters. No, it's because she loathed him.

Loathed the fact that, beyond bringing Hope and Sarah into the world, she was sexually deprived throughout their sham of a marriage. Loathes the fact that they, almost as much as him, tolerated more than loved their mother.

For the fragile Hope and sexually exuberant Sarah, however, death counsels the voguish proposal of a personal memoir. That's when, quickly, inevitably, secrets Gerald Candless nursed like life itself extend far beyond the grave indignities visited upon his long-suffering spouse. The fact that the Gerald Candless Sarah meets was not even Gerald Candless at all.

Vine can do this sort of thing in her sleep and if her last, the underwhelming The Brimstone Wedding, felt as if she actually had, then this new one is something of a return to form. Which is not to say it doesn't have its fair share of problems. She opposes Ursula's emotional suffrage with the physical masochism of Sarah's enigmatic but rather dreary affair. But since we care not a jot for her lover, and because Vine can't find a satisfactory out, the analogy capsizes.

In fact, it's long been a truism that she writes with far more flair and authority about gay relationships than straight ones, and that's no less true here than in the suffocating No Night Is To Long. That's the book this new one is most like, both in tone and consequence, and, I suppose, success. The Chimney Sweeper's Boy takes much from that earlier book, wedding it to a family history saga that reads like an F-Plan digest of the frighteningly intricate Asta's Book. The chances are that you will see the end coming from about halfway and thus the book loses marks for subtlety, but with Vine such a mistress of characterisation and small, everyday horrors, at least you won't want to put it down until you get there.