The first half is a little bit of a paint-by-numbers mystery, but the structure eventually collapses and it becomes…uh, quite Ballardian?

Someone dive bombs him with a hang glider when he climbs to the lemon grove above the Hollingers’ burned-out villa looking for evidence. Upon arriving and talking with his sibling, Charles finds to his horror that his brother has confessed to everything, and has no interest in trying to escape his plea. Charles goes to visit Frank in prison early in the novel to interrogate him about why he would confess to a crime he clearly could not have committed. Arriving on the scene, his brother Charles is shocked to find that, though not even the police believe him capable of the crime, Frank is determined to plead guilty. The club manager, Frank Prentice, pleads guilty to charges of murder - yet not even the police believe him.

On the surface it’s bustling with good, clean, wholesome bourgeois activities, a theatre club putting on plays by Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter, an arts cinema, pottery classes, tennis lessons, choral societies – it’s Surrey by the sea.

His natural aloofness shaded into some unhappy emotion that I could only glimpse around the bony corners of his face. By committing a series of low level crimes, the citizens of the sleepy, fortified Spanish Costa del Sol communities awake to re-engage with each other and the world.Over time Charles becomes increasingly immersed in resort life and less concerned with his brother’s plight. And all this is put to the test, when the likeable energetic Crawford recruits Charles in him and his rich sponsors’ next project which is to move on to the next sleepy ex-pat resort down the coast, the Residencia Costasol. This narrowness of plotting, and the narrowness of vocabulary, are central issues in critiquing Ballard’s work. He imagines a self-policed post-civilised society in which the citizens steal, vandalise, commit rape and arson, prostitute themselves and deal drugs as a series of leisure options.

Its beginning is really nice and you get the feeling that this is going to be such an amazing story and wow-how-much-fun-you're-gonna-get. It involves kinky goings-on in a wealthy British resort community in Gibraltar, where there's not much to do but suntan, get high and play sex games. He decides to launch his own amateur investigation because the police, with a confession in pocket, are not really interested in muddying the crystal clear waters of a slam dunk conviction.

He runs over to rescue the woman, the man makes a getaway out the other door, but the woman, although obviously assaulted, with her knickers round her ankles and bleeding from the mouth, shrugs him off, pulls herself together and walks away. As the tennis pro at Club Nautico, Crawford has become something of a messianic figure who has turned crime into a performance art.