Set in Havana - a crumbling Havana bereft of its upper caste - this rather short novel-thriller comes close to Graham Greene country but somehow sheers off from it.
The narrator is a retired, slightly aesthetic-minded, English civil servant who is also homosexual, and who gets involved in a violent corner of Havana's sizeable underworld. Francis King is usually sure of himself in this kind of mouldering, ex-colonial background, though the storyline itself seems contrived.