John Charles is a seventy-year-old English writer living in France. He has three grown-up children, with whom he gets on perfectly well, and an ex-wife, Sibilla, who left him some years ago. As a writer he has a reputation, and by wise investment has made himself comfortably off, if not wealthy; there remains his house, which is comfortable, and his garden, which he tends of which he is very fond. He is strollling in it one afternoon when someone takes a pot shot at him, but misses. The would-be assassin does not return, but John cannot let the incident rest. He makes himself very visible, keen to draw the gunman out, and while he does so, travelling through Europe, he draws out his own past, peeling back layer upon layer of self-deceit and self-deception. Constructed with labyrinthine skill, full of allusion and illusion, this is a subtle, deeply-layered `mystery' from acknowledged king of the European crime novel.
