Apple Tree Yard: From the writer of BBC smash hit drama 'Crossfire'

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But it cannot survive the forces unleashed by her attraction to a man who tells her he works as a security consultant at the Palace of Westminster. It was absolutely obvious what was going to happen from the moment the chimp story hit the page, so it was excruciating how long it took, so long that the author had to remind us about the chimps in case we had forgotten or not got the point. There, she is approached by a colleague, George (Elder), who reveals that he has harboured secret feelings towards her for some time.

From the moment she surrenders to the thrill of that desire, her life begins to slip out of her control. In shock, Yvonne denies everything, but the police are convinced that she and Costley colluded in cold blood. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker.We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006). Yvonne is a successful middle-aged geneticist, highly respected in her field and happily married with two grown children. I willingly followed where the author led, and in the beginning of the novel, alternately tried to understand Yvonne and at times even pitied her. Pretend in a myriad of little ways that you feel an interest in your partner’s day or his mother’s turn of health or the 10k he’s running this weekend.

Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. At first I questioned the way the story was told, and I decided that a more straightforward confessional style would have been more effective, but as the story progressed I realised that I was wrong and the author was right: the style she chose allowed her to strike the perfect balance between telling the story and exploring Yvonne’s emotions, and the reasons why she did the things she did. The passionate tryst with a man whose name she doesn’t even know explodes into an affair and Yvonne’s well-organized life and her comfortable, though passionless, marriage, crumble like a dried-out scone.But you forgive them for it, because it’s so refreshing to have middle-aged female characters with a sex-drive on TV. Having also read every Agatha Christie book in her youth, she is potty about crime dramas, and soaks up plots faster than Pinot Grigio.

Yvonne narrates her story from the dock, switching from the trial to the events that brought her there. Yvonne whatever-her-name-was (I’ve forgotten already and will have forgotten the whole book by the weekend) could rival Tess Durbeyfield in the victim stakes.Dr Yvonne Carmichael is a geneticist so eminent in her field that she is invited to speak at parliamentary select committees, which is where her trouble begins.