Michael Dibdin has been praised as the best and most inventive of the new generation of British crime writers. ("Dibdin has a gift for shocking the unshockable reader," says Ruth Rendell.) Now, with The Dying of the Light, he gives us his most unconventional and riveting novel to date.

We open on a familiar scene: the lounge of Eventide Lodge, a typical English country hotel inhabited by the usual cast of English characters. There is the retired colonel installed in his chair near the fireplace, poring over the newspaper; the wealthy invalid swathed in sweaters and blankets, playing game after game of solitaire; the secretive financier, never too far from the telephone; the elegant and icy Lady, whiling her time away at the piano; the clergyman, nodding over a book.

And there are Rosemary and Dorothy: inseparable, longtime residents of the Lodge, would-be Misses Marple, who busy themselves solving the murder mystery they've spun around the days and nights of their fellow lodgers.

Rosemary and Dorothy imagine they need only follow clues and make correct deductions to solve their mystery and unmask a murderer. But far from being a cozy entertainment at Eventide Lodge, death is fast becoming an inexorable reality. And it seems unlikely that the sweet artifice and ingenuity of two blue-haired ladies can prevail against the cynical brutalities of the real world.

Yet as the novel unfolds, in scene after startling, horrifically funny scene, we see again and again that at Eventide Lodge things are not at all what they seem.