MARK Mills has the ability to simultaneously satisfy two seemingly incompatible reading appetites.

As The Whaleboat House demonstrated, he is a 'crime' author capable of the kind of writing more often found at the bedsides of Man Booker judges.

But Mills is also a dab hand at plotting a mystery and, if The Savage Garden doesn't quite bring off these dual skills with the panache of earlier work, it is still a mesmerising piece of writing.

Mills's playfulness is evident in his first chapter: 'My God', the faithful reader is likely to mutter in dismay, 'what has happened to his talent?' But we discover that this chapter is written by a girlfriend of the hero, Cambridge student Adam Strickland. When he is invited to give his opinion, we know he'll have to bite his tongue.

Adam is a complaisant young man just about getting by in the Cambridge of 1958, when he is handed an intriguing assignment: to visit and write about the garden of the Villa Docci in Tuscany, devised in the 16th century by a widower in loving memory of his wife.

Quickly out of his depth, Adam encounters a series of mysteries.

What is the secret of the elderly Signora Docci and her family?

What is the truth about the killing at the villa during the German occupation? And is the beautiful Antonella everything she appears to be?

All of this is handled with brio, not least the vividly realised depiction of Florence.

So iridescent is the prose that it is easy to forgive the odd m�lange of books that jostle behind the narrative:

Henry James's The Aspern Papers , in which the hero makes love to the young female companion of a reclusive elderly woman; John Fowles' The Magus, with its seductive young girl leading a mystified protagonist into a secret world; and - considerably lowering the tone of the allusions - good old Dan Brown, with clues to the solution rather schematically laid out like cats' eyes in the road. But Mills is a skilful writer and combines all of these disparate strands into a striking tapestry.