This tricksy caper ranges from 1980s Cambridge to the rise and fall of Liz Truss with entertaining results

Well, it worked for Richard Osman. Twenty-three-year-old Phyl, stuck in her parents’ house with an English degree and a zero-hours job in a sushi chain, is wondering how hard it could be to write a cosy crime novel. “Death in a Thatched Cottage? The Beach Hut Murders? The Flapjack Poisonings?” As another character points out, it’s bizarre that violent homicide has been rebranded as “cosy”. “It’s very British, in some indefinable way.”

Jonathan Coe, the laureate of Britishness, sets his 15th novel against a particularly wobbly period of national history: the short-lived ascendancy of Liz Truss and the death of the Queen in autumn 2022. It is indeed a happily playful and nicely satisfying slice of cosy crime, scattered with clues and red herrings, locked‑room mysteries, teetering cliffhangers and stagily withheld information. Before she is shocked out of her apathy by a sudden death, Phyl also considers trying her hand at the genres of dark academia and auto­fiction, and accordingly one section of the book is a memoir of mysterious goings-on in a Cambridge college in the 1980s, and another a report in real time of a search for a rare book, with two narrators who can’t agree on whether to use the present or the past tense (“fake and embarrassing”).