This book is no one’s cup of tea. In fact, it’s not a cup of tea at all. It is a passionfruit mezcal margarita with chilli salt around the rim, served at midnight in the Geisha Bar in Northbridge surrounded by Perth’s shortest of miniskirts and bulging-est of biceps, with Ferraris and Lambos parked outside.

Madly takes us into a fictionalised Perth medical world centred on the Sir John Cartwright Hospital, a thinly disguised Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital, where apparently every senior doctor is dangerously sexy, both in and out of the bedroom, bodies are sculpted, smiles are lethal, cars are Italian, and the nurses and allied health professionals appear to have been recruited according to criteria not ordinarily found in public hospital employment advertisements.

This intrigued me because an acquaintance of mine trained as a doctor in Western Australia and spent years at Sir Charles Gairdner. So naturally I asked her whether the hospital of her youth had really been populated by devastatingly handsome older doctors with Ferrari-grade bodies and piercing smiles, surrounded by an auxiliary workforce of minor goddesses.

“Pretty much,” she said. Well, that cleared that up!

At the centre of all this is Natasha, a pharmacist with what might politely be called a colourful history: former stripper, former drug user, now professionally respectable, if psychologically somewhat crowded. Natasha does not so much contain multitudes as maintain a small internal cast. There is the Slut, there is Goldilocks: the “good girl”, apparently, although I have always thought Goldilocks an odd choice for moral rectitude given her tendency to break into strangers’ houses, eat their food and fall asleep in their beds, and then there is Natasha herself, variously Nat and Tashy depending on who is speaking to her. The shifting names reinforce the sense that identity, in this novel, is something fluid and occasionally theatrical.

Having dispatched her boring former boyfriend Rick, Natasha fixes her attention on Dr Sebastian Mancini, a doctor with the sort of name that practically arrives wearing an Ermenegildo Zegna suit. He also happens to belong to Perth’s notorious Mancini crime family, which adds a useful degree of danger to proceedings. What follows is a gloriously unrestrained, sex-fuelled romp in which Natasha and Sebastian attempt to build something resembling a relationship while negotiating family expectations, criminal associations and the faint but persistent requirement that they maintain some degree of propriety and dignity.

At least outside the bedroom. Inside it, propriety has evidently been given the night off.

And then, inevitably, the whole thing builds towards a crescendo and, this being Madly, a climax….well, several, actually. But one unresolved one. Which is either deeply frustrating or very clever, because it leaves us with little choice but to demand the second instalment of the Madly, Deeply, Truly trilogy, a title sequence that surely owes at least a raised glass to Savage Garden’s Truly Madly Deeply.

So yes, I will be back for more. I loved it. Possibly with another margarita, and cold showers at the ready.