A parallel plot details the complex romantic relationships among the residents and guests at Octavian Gray's seaside country house.

Also in residence is Mary Clothier, a widowed friend of the family whose teenaged son Pierce is in love with Octavian's 14-year-old daughter.

Pierce's despair over Barbara's indifference leads him to swim into an underwater cave, endangering his own life and that of Ducane, who tries to rescue him.

Aside from Radeechy's attempts at magic, the novel's many supernatural elements include a flying saucer sighting and Ducane's shapeshifting manservant, who claims to be the son of a mermaid.

His seaside property, Trescombe House, is home to Octavian and his wife Kate and their 14-year-old daughter Barbara, as well as to the widowed Mary Clothier and her 15-year-old son Pierce, and the divorced Paula Biranne and her nine-year old twins Henrietta and Edward.

Also in residence are Octavian's older brother Theo, and Willy Kost, a classical scholar and Dachau concentration camp survivor who lives in a cottage on the property.

The leaked story included the information that Radeechy was a practitioner of black magic whose rituals involved the participation of naked women.

Ducane and Mary become engaged to be married, Pierce and Barbie have sexual intercourse for the first time, and Jessica travels from London to Trescombe House in search of Willy.

The Nice and the Good has elements of romantic comedy, ending as it does in general reconciliation, forgiveness, and a pairing off of the characters in a manner suggestive of Shakespeare's romances.

[2]: 66  The light-hearted romance is integrated with a thriller-like plot that begins with a revolver shot and ends with the protagonist uncovering a concealed murder.

Supernatural elements include Fivey, Ducane's mysterious servant, whose mother "was a mermaid", and the flying saucers that the children at Trescombe House see.

It was written during the period when Iris Murdoch, a professional philosopher, was working on the concept of Good, particularly the question of how morality is possible without a belief in God.

The Nice and the Good was widely reviewed and generally well received, although Bernard Bergonzi, writing in The New York Review of Books found it "readable, certainly" but an "unimportant book", and suggested that its favourable reception was due to Iris Murdoch's "annual novel" having attained the status of "venerable British institution".

[9] Elizabeth Janeway, in The New York Times, called it Murdoch's "best, most exciting, and most successful book" and found it "hard to imagine anyone not enjoying it".

[3] On the other hand, A.S. Byatt praised Murdoch's "gift for analysing conscious thought in her characters as well as unconscious impulses and emotional states".

[8] Later writers have dealt with the ideas discussed in The Nice and the Good, and the way they inform the characters' behaviour, often in relation to other Murdoch novels.

Peter J. Conradi notes that The Nice and the Good, an " 'open' and benignly comic" novel, contrasts sharply with its " 'closed' and apocalyptic" predecessor The Time of the Angels.

Writers on theology have been particularly interested in how The Nice and the Good, among other Murdoch novels, relates to the question of morality in a post-religious age.