Dark Satanic thrills

If you have not yet gone on holiday, do pack The Anatomy of Ghosts. It is excellent airport reading; and this is no trivial recommendation. Airports are where one needs fiction most desperately — and nowhere more so than in Kabul, where I had to work through no fewer than seven queues for incompetent security checks, inching up a modern version of Purgatory. Even in these testing conditions, Andrew Taylor’s book beguiled.

The Anatomy of Ghosts is, like Taylor’s best-known previous novel, The American Boy, historical crime fiction. In a further refinement of genres, it is a historical campus murder mystery, being set in Cambridge in 1765, in a fictional college, Jerusalem, that bears a remarkable topographical resemblance to Emmanuel — even down to a huge and ancient weeping oriental plane tree in the Master’s garden. Some pedants may object that the ornamental planes in Jesus and Emma were not planted until the start of the 19th century; however, a 17th-century bishop of Ely boasted a well-grown plane tree, so this is not a horticultural anachronism.