Publish and Be Murdered Paperback / softback

She’s filleted the Foreign Office, clobbered the Cambridge colleges, jeered at the gentlemen’s clubs, burlesqued the bishops – now Ruth Dudley Edwards pillories the publishing world. Living with Rachel and contemplating marriage, Robert Amiss feels settled at last.

He even has a proper job, managing The Wrangler – a right-wing, 200-year-old English magazine.

Life should be sweet, but the atmosphere at the paper is poisoned by rampant egocentricity and savage ideological battles.

Things are so bad that not even the appointment of Baroness Troutbeck as a columnist seems likely to bring much cheer. When the drunken deputy editor is found drowned in a bowl of punch, suspicions of foul play are brushed aside by the police.

But after another death, Chief Superintendent Jim Milton takes charge of the investigation, spurred on by relentless chivvying from the baroness.

Is the murderer a Conservative, enraged by the paper’s switch to New Labour?

An ambitious journalist, desperate to break the promotion logjam?

There is no shortage of motives and, in typical Dudley Edwards style, no shortage of laughs in this riotous farce.