A young woman lies murdered, daubed in obscene graffiti; the police debate which of London's multifarious murderers could be responsible - the Hackney Hammerer, the Lipstick Man, The Messenger - until Chief Inspector 'Jake' Jakowicz is called upon to investigate another series of deaths, the victims exclusively male, exclusively subjects of the controversial Lombroso Program designed to uncover the mental deficiency in the male population that leads to a propensity for violent crime.

Philip Kerr's new novel unfolds in a country not too far from our own, but one wrested just far enough into the future for the lives of the people to be infected with advanced technologies and barely suppressed violence on the streets; where serial killing has become almost a national pastime. Jake discovers that the Lombroso Program has coded-up its participants with the names of authors from the Penguin Classics catalogue, and it's not long before the authorities determine that they are looking for one Ludwig Wittgenstein, but matching man and deed is a long and dangerous game.

This novel immediately has two things against it: the tradition of British crime is long but never terribly glorious; and if the corpse of serial killing is still alive then it is barely twitching. Kerr's solution is, therefore, all the better. By moving his tale forward he allows himself the space to imagine a society in slow, divided collapse - the population are addicted to unrated television that revels in porn and sensationalist reporting; parts of the capital have been allowed to fall into rat-infested disrepair; murderers are now sent into punitive coma as punishment; and Oxford Street has been glassed over in a giant mall development. Against this then, a rise in violence is to be expected, and so it comes, and along with it the most intriguing elements of this particular crime, as Wittgenstein the self-appointed assassin begins to increasingly identify with the author of the Tractatus, and Jake distinguishes within the detection process the extraordinary parallels with philosophical inquiry.

The strengths of Kerr's novel are several: in drawing on philosophy for its background it allows an expansion of what is in essence a routine (if hi-tech) policer into something immediately more provocative and stimulating, even down to the killer delivering a lecture to the police in celebration and justification of the act of murder itself. And in its partially updated setting - portable satellite phones, high-power gas-guns - Kerr is able to expand British crime out of the country house and onto the mean streets. What is not so sure are the first hundred scene-setting pages or so, a somewhat uneasy balance struck between grit and humour that stumbles slightly before finding its feet, alternating chapters of investigation and first person confession to cumulative effect. And in Jake Jakowicz, Kerr has fashioned a suitably arch, feminist anti-hero 'tec for the 21st century, one whose ambivalence towards women is commensurate only to her hatred of men; it would be agreeable to meet again elsewhere. In the meantime, this bastard offspring of Blade Runner (Dick's marvellous novel rather than the movie) and The Silence of the Lambs is an ambitious and commendable slice of off-centre future-grotesque.