I've read several books by Andrew Miller. I particularly admire his first, Ingenious Pain, but I've enjoyed all of them. This one is also well written, with many vivid details and shrewd character observations, and a satisfying plot structured as a pursuit/chase. But there is something slightly dispiriting about the way it so perfectly embodies a particular notion of literary fiction. There's some debate as to whether literary fiction constitutes a genre, and certainly there's nothing here so crass as the hard-drinking detective who doesn't play by the rules, or whatever other box-ticking trope you care to come up for work that does sit firmly within a specific generic tradition, but the adjective that comes to mind is 'tasteful'. Another way of putting that is that it feels like it's taking no risks.