"They did... It's blue."

Detective Dave Moser had a wife until recently - which is about as much of a burden of cliché as Kenneth Abel seems willing to shoulder. Moser pounds a Manhattan beat, the self same city where a Mob bagman and would-be stand-up tagged Joey Tangliero ("About five eight, two-fifty, mid-forties, with black hair, going bald") walked away with three million freshly laundered dollars of his employers' cash. And into the welcoming Federal arms of one Claire Locke.

Across town the youthful daughter of prominent Guatemalan businessman Cruz has surfaced face-down in the river despite the apparent attentions her father's monosyllabic, omnipresent bodyguard. Moser gets to fish her out and do the paperwork and fend off Internal Affairs. They want he should rat out the neighbour who drives him to work and is on the take from just about every New York street-scuzz. Boats like his, they say, don't come on an NYPD salary. And all of this is being cooked nicely by the bitch of summer that has the city in its sweaty grip.

We'll make an exception for this book's length because, for once, Abel's an author prepared to use it. The Blue Wall catches us again and again by not conforming. You hear Joey's act and the Pulp Fiction alarms start and whine ("That's your name? Mr. Joey? We're in a Quentin Tarantino movie, here.") But Abel ingeniously weaves this sadsack's aspirations into his well-measured climax. You start and matchmake for Moser and Locke but they mercifully end the book as estranged from one another as before we arrived. Abel comes to this with no agenda vouched or served.

And for once, when all of these disparate elements eventually collide (as it is dictated that they surely must) it is with an uneasy, messy rag-tag of loose-ends and unpaid debts. We tie in the Mob, bent cops and the killing fields of South America without it should ever feel contrived. Abel's plotting is bravura stuff, his prose its clipped and efficient equal.

The three years that have passed since his outstanding debut have not been squandered. The superbly tangled Bait signalled a rare and serious new talent that The Blue Wall more than underlines. One of the very best crimers since, well, Abel's last.