Two words: Nasty, disappointing. Nasty because the prologue to Andrew Taylor's latest comes on like a spiritual cousin of sorts to Gordon Burn's gruelling, brilliant Fullalove. Disappointing because - despite initial scepticism over a serial killer thriller set against the changing face of the Church of England - three-quarters of The Four Last Things is top-drawer unsavoury stuff.

The set-up is simple: the young daughter of a newly ordained woman priest and an inner city policeman (that's covering all your bases) is snatched by Eddie and Angel. He is borderline paedophilic, an ex-school teacher with an unfortunate paternal fondness for small girls; she conniving and manipulative, with urges gravitating more towards murder than the maternal.

And as if that wasn't bad enough, body parts of other missing kiddies - a hand here, legs there - start fetching up at disparate sites across London as though their killer were laying a trail.

That last is the hurdle Taylor never quite vaults; it's not the details themselves so much as the faux-Morse reasoning behind them. So much of this book - Eddie's scheming, abusive father, his domineering mother - is distressingly excellent, cold-blooded and unsparing, but with a seam of compassion for the dangerous but largely innocent son. It is that that advances the early pages their tension, the book irresistible in its ugliness.

Unfortunately, though, Taylor has made a rod for his own back. Angel is a necessarily blank canvass, but where Eddie finds her beguiling, we are left with little beyond crudely drawn fiendery. Despite dark hints at the close, she makes for a pallid Hindley to his Brady.

Likewise the whole inflated Church conceit, elephanting about the book in search of a rationale. Sally's crisis of faith is half-hearted, her husband so ineffectual you want to smack him. If this really is the first of a trilogy - as it threatens - it is to hoped that the author has a clear view of the bigger picture.

In the end then Taylor hasn't the courage of its convictions. He can certainly write; parts are genuinely compelling. He is to be praised too for the controversy courting up-frontness of this post-Cromwell Street entertainment: the breathless abduction; the predatory schoolgirls who abuse Eddie; his father's exploitation of their neighbours; the carefully labelled joints of deep-frozen tot. It is just a shame that he felt to need to impose on all of that a diffident plot device that simply hang-offs the carefully constructed Eddie character like a third leg. The Four Last Things reads like a novel sabotaged by its own author's failure of nerve. ** 1/2