STONE’S FALL Iain Pears (Jonathan Cape, £18.99)

Iain Pears is best known for his unlikely bestseller The Instance of the Fingerpost, an intellectual whodunnit which explored the murder of a 17th-century Oxford don.

This time the Oxford writer tackles more topical issues, with a novel set in the tangled world of banking, financial wheeler-dealers and international espionage.

Stone’s Fall is the life story of industrialist and financier John Stone, who has mysteriously fallen from a window. It is narrated by three different people, going backwards in time from 1902 to 1867.

Pears achieves this structure by using as his first narrator the young journalist Matthew Braddock, who has been employed by Stone’s widow to discover his long-lost child, to whom he has left a legacy.

Pears, who was once a journalist with Reuters, has tremendous fun describing the lowlife of turn-of-the-century Fleet Street, but Braddock is an irritatingly obtuse character, failing to understand that he is being set up for a fall.

We only discover the truth when Braddock is given two bundles of papers 50 years later. One tells the life story of Henry Cort, one of England’s first spies, who has fingers in every nation of Europe in the run-up to the First World War – and in Stone’s business empire.

Cort is a wonderful character, who seems to have the cold morality shown by John Le Carre’s 20th-century spy Smiley, owing loyalty only to his country and not to friends or family — or so we think.

The second bundle of papers is Stone’s own memoir, unravelling the central mystery of the book, which has been puzzling the reader for the previous 600 pages.

Pears, an expert on art history, shows a sure hand in portraying his wide-ranging settings, from Victorian Venice and fin-de-siècle Paris to the London underworld, as well as their warring ideologies.

He is also interested in the roots of Stone’s entrepreneurial drive, comparing his wonder at industrial machinery to a medieval peasant looking at a cathedral, “stunned into reverence without comprehension”.

It’s an enjoyably gripping story, which left this reader guessing right to the end, as Pears unravelled the disparate elements of his ambitious plot.