Three? Four? I'm honestly torn on this book. The problem isn't Sarah Waters the novelist so much as Sarah Waters the detective novelist. As usual, she picks a historical setting (this time, 1920s London) and then starts uncovering hidden layers both within the characters, within society, and within the narrative itself. Her characters never "just happen to be gay", without making that ALL the book is about; when Waters writes a story about a posh but impoverished landlady who falls for her lower-class tenant's wife, she uses that not only to tell a love story that must happen in secret for various reasons, and to explore 1920s views on women's sexuality and homosexuality (which could make the book a lot drier than it is), but also to have a narrator who queers (heh) the story itself. Narrators who are used to keeping things hidden - to live just to the left of the blinkers "polite" society - can see a lot of other things that are out there. Even if they don't see their own blinkers.

That's all neat, and Waters' eye for detail and character is just as good as ever; this is a novel where class, gender, sexuality, all those things that you're not supposed to cross take turns leading the plot (seriously, more novels should use sociolects as well as Waters does here).

But then, inevitably for a novel set in Agatha Christie's England, there's the crime story as well. And that's where The Paying Guests tends to make me yawn. It's not that it's implausible or anything, or that it's not related to the main plot, which it very much is; but it just goes on and on, repeating the same dilemmas and doubts, introducing new twists that don't always get properly addressed... Waters uses it to dig into her characters, which is the perfect way to use it, but I'm not completely sure she manages to dig her way out again. Which may well be the point; there are no easy ways out for this plot, and pretending otherwise would break the setting.

That still leaves the novel hovering between a solid four and a very strong three. So, y'know, it's not BAD. At its best, among stolen touches and miscommunication and rapidly changing expectations, it's even very good.