The latest addition to my website is Lawrence Durrell‘s Quinx or The Ripper’s Tale, the last book in his his Avignon Quintet. We might have hoped for a great summing-up but what we, in fact, get is a somewhat feeble attempt to tie up loose ends – what happened to Livia and the Templar treasure – and a sort of flaccid drifting away to the end as the various characters still alive seemed to have lost their spirit and really just want to go to bed. We do get a couple of Durrell’s set-pieces – a colourful gypsy festival at Saintes-Maries and the final attempt to open up the tunnels where the Templar treasure is buried but which has been booby-trapped by Austrian sappers. However, the rest of the book is quite dull and disappointing. This was Durrell’s final novel and it shows.