‘True crime’ is a genre that claims superiority over imagination, speculation and fantasy. It makes a virtue of boredom and detailed accounts of procedure and paperwork, and characteristically narrates two things: the process of investigation and discovery, and the events that set them off. But what happens if those procedures can’t be narrated? What becomes of the genre’s claims of full and complete truth?

Owing to legal strictures, Thomas Harding has written a book which, I feel, falls frustratingly short of the book he wanted to write.