This predictable narrative trajectory is rather tiresome. Tulloch doesn’t expend much energy on challenging the conventional notions of the high-class sex trade: Violet queasily kowtows to her clients, awed, it seems, by their wealth alone. Possible sexual transactions with women are simply dismissed with ‘you get a very bad outcome with women’.

The main problem is Violet, the doe-eyed ingénue. She is a thoroughly unsympathetic character: spoiled, shallow and prone to daft proclamations such as, ‘In this life, there are many dangers, but none as dangerous as a handsome young man’. What a woman who believes she can do more for the starving children in Africa ‘as Lyle’s mistress than she can do for them stuck in a cubicle in a shabby Melbourne office’ was doing working in global aid is the real mystery.