Uzis, Mafia hoods, corrupt cops, divided loyalties: the pack's full of them. Shuffle, mix and match and you too can have your own crime thriller on the shelves up there with the plethora of intriguing, and occasionally arresting debuts of recent months - Jack O'Connell's Box Nine, Robert Leininger's Killing Suki Flood, Michael Corvino's marvellous The Negative.

Bait is Kenneth Abel's first published foray into the novel. This is Boston and its environs. Robert B. Parker and George V. Higgins territory. Our cop is Jack Walsh, with a score-card of one lost partner gunned down a drug-raid. Technically Walsh is an ex-cop, having done time for a young driver in a drunken car smash; he's paid his debt to society and has moved out to small town life with his brother. But when the person you kill is the son of the local Mafia capo you know that, sooner or later, you're likely to turn up as a dead man yourself.

Walsh is the bait - the police and the Feds want capo Johnny D'Angelo, and think this is the one man who can deliver on a plate. For his part, Walsh is not so interested in the big boss, he wants to know what happened to his partner; he wants to know what Keenan, the violent, scheming Narco cop knows. This is a place where dividing lines are not so clearly marked, and even when they are cops and the hoods can't always make up their mind which side they prefer.

The first half of this splendid novel is vaguely reminiscent of the revenge-grit of Elmore Leonard's excellent Killshot. Walsh is waiting, arming himself with a Heckler & Koch MP5 with night-sights (details are important), hiding out in basements from killer thugs. He gets to know the local potteress; later he gets to know the US Attorney Kate Haggerty, and both times it doesn't develop how you expect.

Nothing in Bait develops quite as you expect.

The latter half is a web-spinning exercise, a gathering net of twisted allegiances. People have to die, because people always have to die in stories like this, but Abel doesn't always kill those you've tagged for a bullet. He short-circuits these confrontations, turns things around when you start to get the plot. D'Angelo strays from vengeful tough to surprisingly philosophical elder statesman: "I want you to know, I pick up a gun, it's not in anger. I'm protecting my family. You know what I'm saying?"

This is the Elmore Leonard of Pronto. Dutch Leonard is a necessary analogy - he presides over the entire genre anyway, over Hiaasen, over James Hall, and this is less frenetic Hiaasen, more assured Hall, albeit with cold and ice in place of the almost ubiquitous Florida these days. (Hall, Parker and James Lee Burke all line-up to praise Abel to high-heaven on the back cover, and maybe it's not just for money).

There's a complexity to this stuff, a teasing of the conventions. If the characters don't know where they're going then at least Abel always does. Precisely. That's what makes Bait as good as it is. And it's only his first book. The mind, as they say, boggles.