Meg Elizabeth Atkins has won many plaudits for her fiction on both sides of the Atlantic. For the acumen and elegance of her writing, reviewers have compared her to Elizabeth Bowen and Barbara Pym, but increasingly, as in Samain, Palimpsest and Tangle, she has been engaged on creating an amalgam of the literary novel with crime and horror fiction. What interests her particularly are the almost demonic undercurrents beneath the polite and genteel surface of English middle-class life, usually in a small community. A situation arises in which subconscious forces erupt through the repression and containment of daily existence with violent and even murderous consequences.

Cruel as the Grave, her first novel for several years, is set in a seemingly tranquil Cheshire town, but it opens with the discovery of a body in a river and the circumstances are suspicious. The police investigation impinges on an eminently respectable local family living in Edwardian splendour, the Willoughbys, and the results are disturbing, even tragic. One strand of the narrative follows the attempt by the police to make sense of the contradictory evidence they collect. In the other main strand, Atkins focuses closely on the complex relationships of the family itself, gradually peeling off layers to reveal a hidden history that a chance encounter forces into the open. As a mystery full of suspense, Cruel as the Grave manages to be a whodunit, a whydunit and a howdunit, but it is just as satisfying as an exploration of the tension between sexuality and social appearance in the English class system.