Liberal dilemmas don't get much more acute than what to do with the assault rifle you find in the garden when you are planting plum trees as a distraction from writing the academic paper that you hope will kickstart your career. Calling the police would seem an obvious solution, but Hawes's dithering hero, John Goode, has a week with the family away to wonder whether the gun might be a way to dig himself out of his professional rut and to buy the good life in a big north London house near a decent school for the kids. Hawes fires off plenty of rounds at Goode's ex-leftie anxieties, his professional ego and Pooteresque snobberies, but the targets are obvious. Some bullets hit home, and Goode's epiphany as man of action, when he actually fires off a rifle on a Prague shooting range and smells gun smoke on his lecturer's jacket, is a comic bullseye. But with so many clips being let loose against such close-range targets, the reader neither cares nor laughs when these stuffed dummies fall.