There's more than the faintest whiff of deja vu lingering in the air about this novel. Somewhere near the start we learn of Matthew Scudder's frame-up of misogynist-psychopath Leo James Motley, lying to a jury to see a career criminal sent up the river for hurting Elaine, call-girl acquaintance of the cop. While maybe it wasn't strictly legal, Scudder is able at least to justify things to himself.

12 years have passed: Scudder has drunk himself off the force and gone private; and an ex-call girl friend of Elaine is found slaughtered among the bodies of her family. The police accuse her dead husband, but the cuttings being sent back to New York by anonymous hand say different. Suddenly the people around Scudder are turning up dead, and even those who simply share a surname are no longer safe.

If there's nothing revolutionary - or even that new - in here, then at least Block can be commended for the spiteful glee with which he stirs and spices familiar ingredients. There is a convincingly hard-core malice in Motley; an entirely self-serving, irredeemable streak of violence-on-a-stick. There is a cruel and unusual sexual ambiguity to his rage, from the vicious use of abuse of women to his sadistic delight in killing a part-time cop.

Less certain is Scudder, the more hackneyed recovering alcoholic, but at least Block has the sense to use the round of former bar haunts and endless AA meetings to further events and not strangle the fledgling plot under lumbering character development. Only once, when Scudder contemplates a bottle in his hand, do the cliché readings nudge the red.

Better is the way in which Motley is often a phantom, chased by reputation and the trail of bodies in his wake. And better still, the pay-off is dragged out by the same sense of street morality that runs, often unspoken, through much of the narrative, with Scudder's questioning of his own methods in needing a frame to send the killer down. (Interesting in its references, Block's novel recalls Cape Fear in its heart, albeit with a more morally ambiguous coda; and Thomas Harris' masterly Red Dragon with its household slaughter.) The feeling of mortality - bloodied pavements; looking for marks of sodomy on corpses; the haunted fear of the city's gay clubs - is palpable.

A Ticket to the Boneyard is hardly a classic, having the feel of a more malevolent reading of the mean streets of Robert Campbell's Chicago, but nevertheless, possesses a commendable vigour, and enough of a cheeky, unflinching eye (check the high-rise suicide for evidence of that) to more than sustain it through to the end. It would make a damn good movie.