Further Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin

Further Tales of the City is the third in Armistead Maupin's six-volume series of serial novels of San Francisco life in the Seventies and Eighties. The last glorious days of the sexual revolution, before AIDS ripped through the carefree city.

The action, as in the previous two books, centres around 28 Barbary Lane, the apartment block owned by the colourful Anna Madrigal, who grows marijuana in her garden from named and loved plants. By now we readers know her secret, but there's more in the story, and bisexual Mona Ramsay uncovers it for us when she makes a brief but interesting visit to Winnemucca.

The characters from the earlier stories are still around, mostly, and we meet a few new ones, most notably Prue Giroux, a society columnist who stumbles across a derelict living in Golden Gate Park who also has a major role to play in the story.

There's another cruise ship voyage in this book, this time north to Alaska and a chase extending across the Bering into Russia. Credibility is stretched to the limit here, with bunny-buntings and a kidnapping engineered by an unlikely character before everything is worked out.

As ever, half the fun is in the ridiculious plot twists, and the other half is the deft dialogue and sharp characterisation. San Francisco is a major character in the book, as are the various cultural groupings from nurserymen to A-Gays.

Illness and hospitals are once again in the forefront of the action, and we get to briefly meet a doctor who has been a feature of the story from the start.

Okay. It's soap opera. Spicey, atmospheric, sparkling soap opera. But remember the format: this novel was written a chapter at a time, published in the daily San Francisco Chonicle. It was hugely successful at the time of publication, and never out of print since. They even made a miniseries out of thius book.

As with the previous titles in the series, I loved it.