The fourth in the First-born of Egypt sequence revives the issue of Lord Canteloupe's succession, and gives Raven the chance to push back the boundaries of good taste a bit further...

As we know from the earlier parts of the sequence, Canteloupe is too decayed (or possibly too idle) to father a child himself. His first attempt at arranging a surrogate has produced an infant with mental and physical handicaps that clearly make it an unsuitable candidate to inherit a marquisate: he has put arrangements in place to produce a second surrogate, but the inconvenient baby Tullius must be got out of the way somehow. If the last book had shades of Dick Francis, we seem to have stepped back into the baroque world of Mervyn Peake here. But Raven never loses his sense of irony: only he would arrange that the story should reach its grotesque climax in the lunch interval of a country-house cricket match. ( )