Cleary works to his own well-hewn formula; Moss finds hers in the vast literature of serial killing, and the hoary fictional interest in innocents who trespass in dangerous business. Thus Scobie Malone’s father and mother (devout unionist, devout Catholic) are here again for tea and aphorisms. The social and political scene is tiredly sketched (‘the world spins in monotonous circles’) as though its changes were not the concern of police. Scobie is as upright as ever, neither given to swearing nor aware of what Diazepam is. He and his wife still make love as often as possible, but only when the children are out of the house: ‘He loved her, every nook and cranny of her’. The married sex of the Malones is no less plausible than the coupling of Canadian model and student of forensic psychology, Makedde Vanderwall, with ‘handsome, cloyed’ (?) Detective Andy Flynn in Fetish: ‘They moved together with passionate eagerness; fingers, lips, bodies, melting into one’.

Dead bodies are more properly the business of police procedurals and serial killer romps than writhing ones; decomposition more the point that ‘melting’. Some of Cleary’s characters have faces that seem to belong on corpses. There is this of Damien Vanheusen (remember the shirts?) who is ‘Sydney’s Versace, only he’s straight’: ‘the face was bony, with eyes set deep among the bones; sometimes the eyes too could become bony’. Moss gives us lurid examples of a serial killer’s bloody work. Women of the ‘young, raven-haired and seductive’ kind fall under his hammer and knife. Clasping his trophies (the stiletto-heeled shoes) his cum is memorably depicted as ‘a spew of milky vexation’.

Finding him is Flynn’s task. It is accomplished despite the reckless and infantile interfering of Makedde, let alone any attention to police methods of probability by the author. Scobie Malone has two crimes to solve in tandem. One is four years old and people want it forgotten. The other is the regular stuff of today’s headlines: the kidnapping of little Lucybelle Vanheusen, ‘that brat on the McDonald’s commercials’. While Cleary is fond of reminding us of Scobie’s old cases, he has not remembered Jon Benet Ramsey (or would rather just solve his own similar crime). Moss’ Detective Flynn, who has done a profiling course at Quantico with the FBI, pulls precedents for stiletto fanciers from the computer data base. Instinct (wrong at times) will still do Malone.

Dilemma is sprinkled with curious descriptions of the ‘she wilted in her body stocking’ brand; striking similes – ‘a depression as dark as a pocket’ – and whimsy: ‘some day soon the nation would be a republic’. Prose and thought processes are by numbers for Moss: ‘It’s all a terrible dream’ (of course it isn’t); ‘Dating a key witness is a definite no-no’ (he does anyway). After ‘what seemed like an eternity’, Fetish reaches an ending in which enough of its initial verve and inventiveness is recovered to suggest that – with more discipline – Moss might manage another book. Cleary’s promise of more Malone to come is emphatic: ‘Homicide and Serial Offenders go on: murder never stops’. And nor yet, we can be glad to say, has this old trouper.

Correction: An earlier version of this review referred to Jon Cleary as John Cleary.