ANGELS PASSING is a massive, Dickensian trawl through the depths of life in Portsmouth. With a compactly labyrinthine plot, uniquely human policemen, a grotesque rogues' gallery of squalid villains and a shadowy child as its anti-hero, it is easily the best novel that Graham Hurley has ever written.

Focussed around two investigations - the hunt for a ten year-old boy who may be linked to the death of a teenage girl, and a murder enquiry prompted by the discovery of the body of a small-time crook on wasteland north of the city - Hurley takes us to the core of his hero Joe Faraday's flawed relationships with both his girlfriend and his son. He also reveals more of D/C Winter's brutally effective take on the job and provides a grimly recognisable port-mortem report on a society that is coming apart at the seams.

This is at once an unremittingly realistic, fast-moving crime thriller and a bleakly compassionate novel about the price children are paying for a society that is in free fall.