'The Main Cages' is the local name for a treacherous and rock-strewn part of the Cornish sea where the opening and closing events of this novel take place. These are beautifully described and could, I imagine, hold their own against most of the great sea stories of the past.

In a tantalisingly short prologue, a long-retired lifeboat man looks back on a failed rescue mission in which he took part in 1891. Some 200 pages later, the book concludes with a much lengthier description of an even more awful disaster which takes place on the same lethal part of the coast some 45 years later.

Sandwiched between these two virtuoso pieces is a mysteriously slow-moving and repetitive account of life in a Cornish fishing village in the mid-1930s. Delicately underwritten and full of illuminating detail and deadpan dialogue, this part of the book achieves at times a Cranford quality, but I defy any reader to find it as 'thrilling' as the publishers boldly proclaim on the book's cover.

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