This book works almost in spite of itself. From the off, Brian Thompson looks to be forging fences just so as he can leap them in a single bound. Take, for example, his basic set-up. Mr. Pelling wants Mr. Ganley, ex-copper cum private eye, to find his missing teenage daughter, Melissa. Mr. Ganley mutters something about expenses and is on his way. "She was missing," he concludes, "in that irritating and niggling way that a central piece of a jigsaw goes missing." And then Mr. Pelling drops the case. And Ms. Pelling fetches up of her own accord and Mr. Ganley falls into the bed of the estranged Mrs. Pelling. Up and down. Thompson's novel comes at you in waves.

There is some pleasingly tough plotting, although it never holds the book to ransom, and the dialogue evinces a welcome tartness. Patrick Ganley: "I'm a lavatory brush among private investigators, the best sort, had you noticed, are to be found in crime novels." Only not this one. There's a knowing edge to Thompson's book that allows it walk the line between your basic everyday mystery (there are reasons, murders, villains, a sinister little insignia that gives the book its title), a shabby odyssey through a very shabby contemporary Britain, and something else. Something serrated, something that snags your mind as you wander past: "the corkscrew nature of other people, the worm that's always in the bud." Ladder of Angels is consistently better written than you expect.

Not, you understand, that Thompson is here scratching out some kind of hyper-lit trip. He's not Jim Sallis. His book does not reach us freighted in symbolism and literary allusion; that takes talent of a very rare kind. And yet, Ladder of Angels is far more than just a pedantic procedural plod of the kind favoured by, say, the galumping John Milne or the excruciating Nicolas Blincoe. The UK is not favoured, it seems. But there is more to all of this, more on top and way more beyond the obvious. Things peek in from sides of this book. It has, unlike Blincoe and Milne, a genuine authorial voice. It has John Harvey's grit, the wit of those terrific Dan Kavanaugh novels and more besides. Imagine a 3-strip Technicolor Shoestring. Which doesn't ultimately make Ladder of Angels a great book but as Brit crime writing goes, it's a greatly interesting one. In an irritating and niggling way.