However, the sale of foreign exchange has proved very lucrative for many travel agents and Marks & Spencer has simply decided it wants some of the action.They are piloting a commission-free service for customers at their Bath branch. The retailer already has eight other bureaux de change throughout the country and will probably expand the service if it proves popular with shoppers. So, before long, you may be able to buy your foreign currency at all its 285 branches.The Post Office is also experimenting with foreign exchange and has opened bureaux de change in five of its branches.I'm about to book my summer holiday and was going to go to one of the big chains in the high street because I think they offer the best deals. But then one of my friends told me that they have little choice and I'd be better off going to a small, independent travel agent. Is my friend right?The independent travel agent will probably be able to offer you a larger number of tour operators to choose from, because the big chains, or "multiples", are more selective about who they do business with.

Many multiples are tied to tour operators and will usually recommend their sister or parent companies first. For example, Lunn Poly will recommend sister company Thomson, and Going Places will recommend parent Airtours.Often it appears that the multiples can offer you a better deal than the independents. Because of their size and strength, the multiples can demand higher commission levels from tour operators and pass them on to holidaymakers in the form of higher discounts. But it is important to remember that often a condition of the discount is that you buy the multiple's insurance policy, which is usually more expensive than an equivalent one offered by an independent.The best thing to do is to shop around and then stick with the agent that you feel gives you the best service and advice, whether it is a multiple or independent. At the end of the day it is better to get a holiday that is right for you than to save a few quid and go on an unsuitable trip.. On the D147, half-way between Chatres-sur-Cher and La Ferte-Imbault, the forest suddenly thins and you come across what looks, at first glance, like an impressive chateau from the 18th century. It moved cautiously, like a young worm in a fresh corpse, working its way into the still, warm flesh."Jeremiah, too, finds his care for the condemned spilling over into necrophiliac desire and fantasies.

In a scary postscript, the literary equivalent of the hand coming out of the grave in Carrie, the hanged man's mother is seen hanging over the crib of Jeremiah's baby son with a gift.In Binding's scheme, the kindness of strangers is not to be relied upon any more than the protection of parents. The odour of the charnel hangs over the narrative like napalm, and even when the whodunnit plot finally, horribly, explodes there is no redemption. At times, the vicious sexuality which propels the book becomes positively Jacobean in its ferocity. The central murder takes place in the car of a courting couple: "Colin lay dead in the front and now an unknown tongue began to creep over hers.

Solomon Straw's glass eye, the one he turns on his victims' past lives, is a metaphor too far.However, the reader's desire to know the truth of Solomon Straw's last case, the one that makes him hang up his rope for good, overrides literary quibbles. Binding employs a curiously overlapping flashback technique, which is perhaps better suited to the screen than to a novel, and can be heavy- handed with the imagery. Billy Baxter, a comedian in Max Miller mode (catchphrase: "I'm a fancy man, I am") is a luridly unpleasant creation, defined by an endless stream of double entendre that gets darker and darker as the story progresses.A Perfect Execution is essentially a murder mystery, mined with moral fables. Aylesbury in 1963 is a stew of small-town venality, a kind of Ealing comedy gone horribly wrong, with secretaries under siege from lecherous bosses, wives tempted by travelling salesmen and the constant, pawing desperation for "a bit of hows-your-father". By the end of the book, the least retentive reader must have a fair idea of how to hang a man and the knowledge weighs like a dirty secret you would rather not have been told.And yet the author conjures a kind of serenity in the execution chamber that is conspicuously lacking in the outside world. Into my hands they will be received, and I will treat them gently, and without fear or favour."Binding has not shirked his research, and the meticulous, almost obsessive detailing of procedure in the execution scenes are properly unsettling.

As a young man, he witnesses a captured German airman being taunted and mutilated by an English lynch mob. Wounded by shrapnel from the German's exploded plane, "Jem" is powerless to prevent the crowd's revenge. Later, as Jem recovers in hospital, his retarded friend, Loopy, is hanged for a crime he was unlikely to have commited. Haunted by these two helpless, friendless deaths, Jem finds his vocation. As hangman, he will kill men kindly; his efficiency will be a last, friendly office."And I will not harm them," he tells himself in the exaltation of his calling "I will make their journey as peaceful as possible. It is not a bid for fame but a complicated conscientiousness that leads him to take up the hangman's noose.