Chained is the latest outing for Henderson's crime solving artist Sam Jones. It begins in appropriate style: she wakes up with a massive headache and finds herself handcuffed in a cellar. For most people this situation would suggest they'd been abducted. For Sam though the most obvious explanation is that she's had a drugged up night of raunchy sex that went too far. For once that's not the case - she really has been abducted.

For this novel Sam is back in England where she belongs after the best forgotten trip to the States in The Strawberry Tattoo. Sam is most definitely English and the stories are English in character - hence they need an English setting to work properly. You can't get much more English than the main elements of this book - a BBC film shoot, bickering luvvies and animal "rights" protesters. Spice this with a dash of East End gangster and you have the mix that works best for Sam.

The story pivots around one of the actors on the TV show who gets in to a drunken argument about wearing fur. This is picked up by the press and soon she is receiving threats from various loony animal "rights" groups. At the same time she's receiving invitations from loony Telegraph readers - its difficult to say which are the worse! From verbals things turn physical and start to get very nasty. As always, the book is filled with larger than life characters and stuffed with red herrings. As always, I suspected everyone.

There is also the humour that Henderson does so well, if less of it than previously. There is an especially hilarious scene set in Ikea that I can really relate to. Cosy middle-class Sam aint.

Despite those familiar elements, the book is structurally very different to Henderson's previous ones. Sam's awakening at the beginning of the book actually fits chronologically about a third of the way through. That's unfortunate, since it makes that first third drag a little; you keep thinking "get on with it" as you wait for the moment when Sam is actually abducted. It also detracts from the possibility of springing a huge surprise on the readers - were it not for the prologue, no-one would be expecting Sam herself to become a victim. In previous books Henderson has very cleverly dropped in red herrings and built suspense slowly before eventually killing off one or more characters. Here I suspect that some editor persuaded her of the need to start with a bang. Mistake.

Somehow the novel never recovers from this start. All the familiar elements are there, they just don't quite gel. Overall it's an interesting light hearted crime novel, it's just not as brilliant as some of the others. The structure certainly does this book no favours.