Sweet Tooth - Ian McEwen

I liked it. 

I often find McEwen clever for the sake of cleverness almost to a masturbatory extreme, and at times Sweet Tooth bordered on that, but never quite fell into the trap.  Writers writing about writers writing, I find often sink into pastiche and here I couldn't decide how sincerely the writing was portrayed, maybe that's my short-coming and not the author's.

First and foremost it's a good story, an intriguing spy story with enough variables to be unpredictable, and a sympathetic heroine in Serena - though sometimes the 70s setting felt like an excuse to push her dependency on the men in her life to pre-feminism extremes.

But enough gripes.  Sweet tooth is a satisfying spy novel with an intriguing twist or two and enough genuine surprise to prevent me from telling too much of the plot here.

If I were to star it out of 5, I'd give it a sound ****