This is far from the book we so wanted it to be: Higson's fourth outing as novelist and the first real let down. He can't do ends, that we know from before, but up to Full Whack it looked like the next might just pull off that really satisfying climax. So died hope.

It's not even that Getting Rid Of Mr. Kitchen is bad - less frustrating if it were - just that it reads like a damn good idea in its first, carefree draft. We can see the diamonds twinkling in the shit, but they remain tantalisingly beyond our grasp.

The idea: that the book's post-Yuppie-designer narrator (we'll be back to that) has accidentally killed Mr. Kitchen, when all Mr. Kitchen was after was buying a car. The whys hardly matter now, only that stabbing a perfect stranger to death with one of your own statuettes can be an encumbrance when you have a mega-bucks Japanese deal bubbling on the back-burner. What to do? Fess up? Apologise? Throw yourself on the mercy of the courts? Of course not. You protect all this pig-in-shit privilege by getting rid of Mr. Kitchen: "The weak will always get crushed, the stupid will always get fucked, the rich will always win."

This is black comedy, of course - with overdrive and afterburners - and so is it written that even the most elementary of schemes can and will go wrong and wrong again. Your car - with a bootful of Mr. Kitchen - runs out of gas. Your wallet is stolen. You decide to burn the corpse up in the workshop furnace, then lose your keys. And it's your birthday and your parents are knocking and...

"I'm not crazy...I'm just having a bad day."

The comic potential is there, and Higson, as befits the co-writer/star of TV's The Fast Show, knows how to exploit it. But his tone is strangely halting, sabotaging progress almost at every step. Writing in the first person means never placing your narrator in too much jeopardy (however many pills, however much coke or booze he guzzles) because we cannot possibly adjourn without him. It ignites with a real hysterical bent and just stays there, like a rollercoaster that's all straight bits. There are only really two possible outcomes.

What Higson needs is a wall to run his action up against. He trains it out over just 24 hours, but the day he gives himself to dispose of the limpetic Kitchen is purely arbitrary, trading suspense for sadism, content simply to swing the bigger hammer. It gifts us moments, but still reads like something half-developed for TV.

The frankly brilliant volte face he drew out of King of The Ants booked Charlie Higson a front seat on the fast coach to Talented, but, like Ben Elton's recent, highly feted Popcorn - and this is much the better book, incidentally - he forgets that we have to care to get involved. Getting Rid of Mr. Kitchen is never funny or dangerous or sympathetic enough for that, and thus remains one for the Higson completist alone.