Oscar Wilde being used as a fictional detective? I blanched at the very thought – until I began reading, and quickly dropped my objections. The second of Gyles Brandreth’s mysteries sees Oscar Wilde investigating a series of bizarre deaths in London in 1892. When Wilde and the members of his Socrates Club sit down to dinner one evening, an amusing diversion is proposed: each is invited to write down the name of the person they would most like to murder. It seems harmless enough at the time – but soon the nominated victims begin to mysteriously die!

One after another, the club members’ enemies meet sudden and terrible ends, until Wilde becomes convinced one of the dinner guests is responsible. And he has every motive in the world to want to catch him – for he himself was named one of the hypothetical victims. A good old-fashioned Sherlock Holmes-style detective story, with a colourful cast of characters and plenty of action, the book is enlivened by Wilde’s constant witticisms, both real and invented (but uncannily accurate).