And yet, as in The Pledge, if you scratch beneath the surface, the darkness quickly greets you. In rural Switzerland, an anonymous killer trawls the countryside hunting for victims; and in Phnom Penh, there is the poverty, the child prostitution, and the terrible legacy of the Khmer Rouge.

It’s not the only thing that links book and city. There is also the underlying knowledge that life is not based on order but chaos, and that those who do good aren’t always rewarded, just as evildoers aren’t necessarily brought to justice.

On a quiet, almost suburban backstreet a few hundred yards from Phnom Penh’s main thoroughfare is Tuol Sleng, Cambodia’s genocide museum. It’s an ordinary-looking former high school that was used by the Khmer Rouge to extract confessions from so-called counter revolutionaries, and sometimes their whole families, using a variety of torture implements, many of which remain on display today. More than 15,000 people entered Tuol Sleng — their photographs adorn the walls staring out at you; and their bloodstains are still visible on the floors of the old classrooms, but incredibly only seven of them survived the experience. And with no one ever tried for these killings, justice has clearly not been done. And it’s not done for Dürrenmatt’s detective, Matthai, either. He ends up a hopeless drunk, having never caught his quarry.

But, though life may be characterised by injustice and disorder, there is always hope. The child killer is eventually stopped, although it is by chance, and life for the Swiss villagers goes on. As it does for the people of Phnom Penh. The city is full of children. It’s one of the first things you notice. A generation looking forward not back. Remembering but not wallowing.

In spite of everything, however, Cambodia, like Dürrenmatt’s masterpiece, is an ultimately uplifting experience.

Severed by Simon Kernick is published by Bantam Press at £12.99: Relentless is published by Corgi at £6.99 and has been selected as a Richard and Judy Summer Read 2007

Josie Dew

While spending nine months cycling around New Zealand during its wettest year on record I waded my way through Roger Deakin’s soppingly good Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey through Britain. I spent so much of my bicycling and camping time utterly drenched that this book seemed a particularly appropriate read, especially as with so much of New Zealand’s land and roads under water, I felt I had travelled around the country more by flipper power than pedal.

Josie Dew is the author of A Long Cloud Ride published by Sphere at £20. She will be appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 13 at 8.30pm

Anthony Holden

As a biographer, I always feel it indispensable to visit the haunts of my subject, if only to smell the grass while nosing around the backdrops to his life and work. So my vacations tend to get combined with work; I don’t much enjoy them, to be honest, unless I can feel I’ve spent part of the day achieving something. The rest of the time, as a writer of non-fiction, I like to read novels either set or written wherever I may be.

One of my most rewarding memories in this vein is a family holiday in Cyprus in the mid-1980s, when I read Lawrence Durrell’s Bitter Lemons a few miles from where it was written. I then embarked on The Alexandria Quartet, ditto. One day I’d like to read that great work again in Alexandria.

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