What is also true is that former financial high-flyer O'Flanagan, by having as her protagonist another financial whiz, largely proves the advice that you should always try to write about what you know, so that your work resounds with the ring of truth.

Darcey McGonigle is an attractive, intelligent, unassuming, highly-paid, multilingual, conscientious loyal 30something single woman working in the financial services sector in Dublin who, despite her best efforts to efface herself, has done very well and is liked by all.

Even so, she has been badly wounded in love, frets about her big mortgage on a state-of-theart glass and steel high-rise flat down on the docks near the Martha Schwartz garden, and travels a lot on business to the capital cities of Europe, where she keeps several part-time lovers, though never married ones, because our heroine is deeply moral.

Not so her former best friend Nieve, a great beauty who stole Darcey's first true love from under her nose a decade earlier and dragged him off to America, where she has now made it big and is poised to become staggeringly rich when her cannily accumulated shares are floated. Nieve is obsessively planning the wedding of the century back home in Galway, to show them all how well she's done for herself. Here, in my view, the psychology gets pretty ropey, but you can judge for yourself. And she has invited Darcey to the wedding, and the rehearsal dinner.

Meanwhile, another, still smouldering, old flame of Darcey's has reappeared on the scene.

Nieve is the opposite to honourable Darcey, a complete opportunist who got her big start in the financial world when, just out of college and working as a nanny in Spain, she blackmailed her rich employer Max into giving her an important job when she found him with his trousers around his ankles and the housemaid naked in his lap.

This is an intensely moral book. The good get their rewards in the end and the bad get punished, though not too severely.

Almost straight away, O'Flanagan sets Nieve up for a fall, but she doesn't let her fall too far and in the end, she is redeemed.

This book has a lot going for it, not least its likeable protagonist.

There are some great scenes, good twists and good characterisation (I loved the Swiss mother and her hot chocolate). It's quite funny and kind, if a bit flabby in parts and predictable, but when O'Flanagan is good, she's very good.