The book has two narrators. First there is Darian Richards, former head of Victoria’s Homicide Squad, who retires to Noosa only to land bang in the middle of a serial killer investigation that only he can solve. If the plot sounds lamentably familiar, then it gets worse. Richards turns out to be just about the most sanctimonious, self-aggrandising bore ever to acquire hero status in a novel. He is, moreover, some kind of mass murderer himself, judging by the trail of dead crooks left in his wake over the years, although this apparent paradox is never explored.

Then there is sex fiend Winston Promise, whose methodical descriptions of his abductees and what he does to them, having neither literary nor psychological merit, are merely gratuitous. They are also repulsive – the guy makes Hannibal Lecter seem like a Beatrix Potter creation. The author apparently researched this character for some ten years, but there is little in the way of subtlety or nuance to show for his efforts. Unnecessary chapter titles such as ‘Spit-it-out Izzie, the Fuck Monster’ and ‘The Doppelgänger Emittance’, and jokes about serial killers only striking at breakfast, merely confirm the utter tactlessness of the enterprise.

An unremittingly silly, thoroughly unpleasant book, Promise represents the absolute nadir of the detective genre. Poe and Chesterton must be turning cartwheels in their graves.