Novelist Tom Oliver is not the most popular man in the world and, initially, he isn't much missed when he disappears at the end of a week tutoring at a writer's centre in rural Shropshire. It eventually falls to DI Frank Kavanagh and his colleague DC Jane Salt to ascertain whether one of his literary enemies, a former lover, or perhaps one of their humiliated husbands has finally exacted revenge. Is his disappearance an innocent affair, or has he himself now been Written Out? David Armstrong's new Kavanagh and Salt mystery is a dark, but in places amusing, novel that exposes the jealousies and obsessions of the writing business in all its tawdry colours.