Port Mungo by Patrick McGrath (Bloomsbury, £16.99).
Brimming with passion, death, ghoulish psychic energies, there is also incest and a steamy tropical setting.
Like a ghost train ride at a funfair, the spooks and thrills whizz past on either side but there's never any doubt about where it's going.
The story concerns, in McGrath's own words, "the romantic figure of the brilliant but dissolute artist".
It's a romantic tale of passion between Vera Savage, a fiery Glaswegian painter, and Jack Rathbone, her younger artist lover endowed with a Byronic virility.
The pair meet in London, run away together to New York, and proceed through break-ups and make-ups to the fictional town of Port Mungo in Honduras.
Tim Ross
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