I thought for years it was the Marlow book I could do without, having read summaries sufficiently detailed to fill in the handful of references in Peter's Room (I don't think there are subsequent ones?); I felt, I suppose, that it veered a bit close to Blyton territory, and I might be vicariously embarrassed for its author. Of course, none of the summaries mentioned the intelligence agent with the working-class background, Oxford First, Commando service and DSO and bar (!!!) and his fraught but obviously compulsively fatal relationship with the amoral, charming, unsettling scion of the local Big House. Of course they bloody didn't.

I like the portrayal of both Ginty and Peter in it a lot; insofar as there is series continuity in registering the impact that such traumatic events might have had on young teenagers, I think it explains a lot about them--much more than it does Nicola, as it happens.