Death Comes for Peter Pan

Joan Brady Secker and Warburg, £15.99, pp 310 ISBN 0 436 20261 1

In a complicated work Joan Brady has set herself the challenge of presenting the results of some important investigative journalism as a novel.

The Peter Pan of the title is one Peter Kessler, a man who moves in the world of highbrow literary political commentary. In this he is unlike the rest of his extended family, who form a significant proportion of the doctors in a midwestern town in the United States. Differing from their solid reliability, he has at once the …