A week, from the 13th to the 20th of July 2006, which starts with various arrivals in the village of Roque Saint-Jean in the Languedoc-Roussillon.

Dermot Cayce, just over fifty, and Philip Mann, in his late twenties, are outsiders, writer and photographer respectively, assigned to portray a gastronomical wunderkind specializing in molecular cuisine. It is an assignment from which Philip is easily distracted.

In particular by Alice Currie, a few years younger than himself, returning to visit her family in the South of France after a year travelling in India, Thailand and Sri Lanka.

The Curries have made the French village their home for almost ten years, having left England when Alice’s step-father, Rupert Currie, lost his job and opted for a completely new beginning with his wife, Cressida, and Alice’s younger sister, Jenny, now seventeen.

Alice, however, remained in London, training and then working as a dancer. As far as she was concerned, her step-father was someone whose presence she could tolerate for a maximum of one month in twelve. During her year in the East she learned lots of new moves, danced in Bollywood films and, just before her annual visit to the family, learned also of Rupert Currie’s mysterious suicide earlier in the year.

When the week ends on the 20th of July, two further fatalities will have touched the lives of the Curries and Dermot and Philip. Some mysteries will have been solved, but new ones will have been confronted. Of these, not all belong entirely to the real world but are buried deeply and disturbingly in the virtual realities of an addictive metaverse.

But, as usual, most of them involve greed, deception and sex.

Just another week near the eroticised beaches of the Mediterranean, with the World Cup a very recent memory and the Tour de France not yet won.