Two families battling for control of a successful business, a mysterious set of twins and a couple of unexplained deaths  if Vengeance sounds like a Jeffrey Archer novel, that might be the playful intention of John Banville (here writing as Benjamin Black). He's always approached his crime-writing pseudonym with mischievous relish  here, one of his characters thinks an Agatha Christie novel "rather dull"  but serious intent, too: the series featuring 1950s Dublin pathologist Quirke revels in, rather than sneers at, the crime genre.

Yet with this new story, Quirke's fifth outing, it feels as if Banville doesn't wholly commit to the narrative. The prose is gloriously limpid, particularly when Quirke, back on the booze, muses on the "soapy reek of beer, the scald of whiskey". However, the twins' connection to the deaths is so obviously signposted, there's never really a sense of shock or even intrigue.

But maybe that's by design. Near the end, Quirke's daughter discusses the strange necessity for red herrings in detective novels  and next sentence works out the key to one of the deaths. The Benjamin Black novels don't play up to all the clichés of crime drama, and therein lies their enjoyment.