Changes

It was the end of the Christmas holidays and Felix House in an elite area of Oxford was on fire. Two children were dragged from the inferno: one, a toddler, was pronounced dead at the scene and the other, a boy on the cusp of his teens, died in hospital some days later. But where were the parents? Were their bodies in what remained of the house and which was being steadily cleared, or had they left the children at home alone? For DI Adam Fawley it's one of his most disturbing cases. He's still not got over the death of ''his'' son and there's every sign that his marriage is on the rocks. For his team , it's just a heartbreaking, exhausting case.

It's Oxford, but not the Oxford of ''Morse''. The father of the family involved in the fire, Michael Esmond, is an academic, but that's as close as it gets. This is the non-university, non-tourist side of the city, where people live, work and have mainstream jobs. The city's real and so are the people in the story: the Esmond family come off the page well despite being dead or missing when we meet them as Cara Hunter drip -feeds us what's been happening in their lives over the past nine months or so. It's a device which can go wrong - and normally I don't like it - but it works well here and allows a lot of red herrings to grow to full size. I had just about everybody in the cast pencilled in as the murderer and still managed to get it wrong.