It’s hijinks on the high seas in the fourth Polly Pepper mystery, though deducing who did the deadly deed is more or less beside the point – Jordan’s tart-tongued blend of comic camp and acidic gossip is hardly about the sleuthing.

Fading celebrity Pepper, her investments devastated by America’s economic collapse, is reduced to booking a fan appearance on the kool krooz liner Intacti (think Titanic), accompanied as always by her hunky young son, queer Tim, and her long-suffering servant, bisexual Placenta – for a reunion of the Polly Pepper Playhouse cast. Murder intrudes when someone slashes the throat (with a sharpened CD from the TV show’s boxed set) of egotistical diva Laura Crawford, a much-loathed co-star.

The suspect net is cast far and wide, almost capturing Pepper herself, but the real fun in this skewering of celebrity comes from Jordan’s ceaseless stream of bitchy Hollywood asides, name-dropping everyone from Doris Day and Hugh Jackman to Barbra Streisand’s son, Jason Gould, and Charlie Sheen, slammed for his “fluke” of a hit TV show.