Selected as one of the Best Young British Novelists, Edinburgh born Philip Kerr is a thriller writer doggedly determined to avoid his contemporary homeland. His debut triumvirate centred on a German private investigator caught in rise of Nazism (republished recently in one useful volume - Berlin Noir - and highly recommended), while his A Philosophical Investigation pitched headlong into a future London under the spell of Wittgenstein-spouting serial killer. His latest finds him at least inhabiting his own time, if not his own soil.

Set in St. Petersburg, he serves up tough cop Grushko, investigating the gunning down of a well-respected investigative journalist amid the Goodfellas-goings on among the multifarious, warring Mafia factions that have sprung up in the wake of the collapse of communism. But the streets of this once great city are now corpse-spattered, what shops there are ringed by would-be shoppers, and the hotels laid siege by the ever growing bands of hard currency whores. Hard currency (essentially dollars) is the key: without it almost anything that makes life more bearable is simply out of reach.

Kerr's sense of plot development, as previous, is no less acute - the reasons for the spiralling events that enfold Grushko grow, with much credibility, out of two all too familiar concerns of the old USSR: radioactivity and the lack of meat. In that, the machinations of the novel have a nicely rounded feel to them. Far less of a success is the actual thriller strain itself.

Firstly, the almost anonymous narrator (dispatched to investigate police corruption) remains a seriously insubstantial figure who, whether reporting on Grushko or delivering for the reader a potted history of the trials and tribulations of everyday life, is annoyingly bloodless. There is no suggestion here that what we are told is specious though - far from it. The book opens with acknowledgements to those helping Kerr's researches, and his final text wears authenticity like a badge - renting coffins, bars of chocolate years out of date - almost at the expense of characterisation and, most cripplingly, thrills. What works so well as detail in any of the Berlin books blows Dead Meat out of the water, feeling welded into place like some earnest TV documentary on the hard-life of post-Russia rather than local colour there to enhance events taking centre-stage.

Even before publication, Dead Meat is on the Morse-bandwagon, Brian Cox set to essay the Grushko role for the BBC, which, if nothing else, should at least put paid to the badly conceived narration on offer here. But in translating itself to the small screen, the book will have to fight hard to find much in the way of excitement from the terribly under-developed 'action' (while undoubtedly toning down on the extreme violence), or the way in which the plot drags its leisurely feet despite filling less than 250 pages as it is. Given its predecessors, Dead Meat is a disappointingly slight read that suggests Kerr would do as well to kill off this particular cop-franchise before it gets a chance to grow up.