THE PROOF OF MY INNOCENCE by Jonathan Coe (Viking)

*****

WHEN an investigative news blogger is found brutally murdered at a Cotswolds country house conference of far-right movers and shakers, there is no shortage of suspects. Christopher Swann had been monitoring the growth of a sinister think-tank since Thatcher’s 1980s.

Summoned from her own retirement party, just two days before her 65th birthday, Detective Inspector Prudence Freeborne takes one last case, her investigation running the lettuce length of Liz Truss’s ill-advised, and ill-fated, premiership. So far, so cosy murder mystery.

But this is a Jonathan Coe novel, and nothing is as it immediately appears. While there’s a murder to be solved and all the clues are laid out in plain sight, if only we had the wit and wisdom to crack them, there’s much more at play here – and in more ways than one.

Coe’s dark humour is laced with wicked satiric barbs as he addresses the insidious rise of the right wing of the Conservative movement and the ways in which the future might be directed by a Cambridge cabal born in university rooms decades ago, and secretly since nurtured.

So, cosy crime and political satire are having a fling. Yet there’s room for one more bedfellow – because this is a book about books, written about writing. There’s wonderful wordplay throughout – even in the title – a blurring of boundaries between genres, and a mystery within a mystery.

Is Swann’s death the result of his determination to uncover political conspiracy? And what, if anything, might link it to the suicide of an author forgotten for decades, but whose work has been recently rediscovered and hailed as a modern classic of Conservatism?

Let’s be honest. I saw the twist that cracks the case coming. What I didn’t see was that was surely crafty Coe’s intention all along, and there’s a further twist in the tale that’s a dizzying delight. You don’t mind being led down the garden path when the walk is so brilliantly beguiling.

I’ve started writing occasional guest reviews for the popular One Girl And Her Book bookstagram blog, and will repost them here as and when.