In this, Reggie Oliver’s seventh collection of stories the Devil and the Seven Deadly Sins go on holiday to an English seaside resort. And there are other visits to the seaside, which equally deserve Oliver’s suggestively ambiguous title of a ‘Holiday from Hell’, notably by a recently bereaved solicitor troubled by thoughts of mortality, and immortality in ‘The Rooms are High’. In ‘The Perfect Author’ a highly successful author at a seaside crime writing convention seems to be haunted by one of her less appealing creations.

And, with his gift for varied and unusual settings, Oliver takes us elsewhere: to late seventeenth-century Oxford in ‘Absalom’, to Paris in 1867 (‘The Green Hour’), to a remote and terribly strange hotel in Wales called ‘The Druid’s Rest’, to the London of the swinging sixties in ‘The Prince of Darkness’, and, in ‘Rapture’, to what could perhaps be the end of the world.