Having arrived on the Island to bury her recently drowned stepbrother, Talia Greek, the impossibly perfect heroine of "Bermuda,'' former resident Vanessa Fox's tale of "cool, clear water, lazy summer days ... and murder,'' is soon accosted by "an old man with a garden rake'' during the private outdoor funeral.

"He wasn't alone,'' the boozy old man says of the stepbrother, the mystery-shrouded Jonathan Banzard.

"I still got my eyes. I can see. Fella that sails like that don't get hisself killed.'' Of course, Talia is haunted by the old man's words, and sets out to discover exactly what happened to her beloved sibling. Unfortunately, she takes the reader along with her, forcing him or her to endure more than 500 cliche-ridden pages in which even the many (explicitly drawn) sex scenes are pedestrian and dull.

"His look was long,'' one such scene goes. "It showed neither surprise nor alarm. He let his eyes travel slowly down her body and back up to her face.

Water ran in rivulets on to her breasts. He smiled. Her heartbeat remembered that marvellous smile.'' Oh, brother.

Uninspiredness aside, there is also a definite mean streak that runs through the book. The stepbrother's homosexuality, for example, is treated like some big, dirty secret, and Fox has characters saying things like: "Only people who can't make it anywhere else come here. Real second-raters ...

Bermudians are mostly big fish in a small sea.'' A former secretary, model and (huh?) professional gambler, Ms Fox seems to have forgotten that her own family lived here for four years in the 1970s.

Of course, any novel that includes such names as Vanya Gracelove and Chance Toziat is clearly not meant to be taken seriously, and there is some fun in trying to identify the real Bermudian counterparts to such fictional locales as A.W. Marchant and Son and the Tradewinds Club.

In fact, the book should only be of any real interest to locals, who can appreciate the use of Bermudian settings and cringe in mock horror at the author's often simplistic takes on the Island.

Occasionally, Fox does come up with an evocative observation or two, as when she describes the "drift of baking from the Crow Lane bakery'' or writes: "It (the recession) is hardly relevant. The tourists stay away, but there's no noticeable change in standards. (Bermuda) is not like the rest of the world.'' Mostly, though, the writing is laughably bad, consisting of such overripe passages as: "The water lapped warm at the narrow inlet between her thighs, buffeting her gently; the early morning breeze stole around her shoulders. The sun lifting higher, stained gold against the windows of the house. The kiskadees cried early in the poinciana trees; the island slept. She remembered this, yes, she remembered this.'' At best, "Bermuda'' is the kind of disposable tome that is read during outings to the beach and discarded soon after, though even on this score it lacks something, a certain spiritedness or dash of camp. In the world of literary potboilers, there is good trash and there is bad trash. Sadly, "Bermuda'' is not quite either, making it guilty of the genre's one unforgivable sin: it is mediocre trash.

-- Danny Sinopoli