Jake Kerridge

Irvine Welsh

378pp, Jonathan Cape, £18.99 ebook £9.99

One of my favourite Irvine Welsh novels is Crime (2008), partly because of the uncharacteristic tenderness with which he depicts the relationship between a 10-year-old American girl and a Scottish cop, Ray Lennox, who interrupts his Miami holiday to act as her bodyguard when he discovers she’s being targeted by a paedophile ring. Welsh recently adapted Crime as a drama for BritBox, but jettisoned the central storyline and focused instead on Lennox’s investigations into paedophilia and child murder in Edinburgh, which the novel described in flashback.

The result was a bleaker and more conventional policier than the book – and Welsh has now written a sequel that feels more in keeping with the TV show than the novel. Understated as ever, Welsh begins the book with a detailed description of the castration of Ritchie Gulliver, a Tory MP fallen foul of a serial killer targeting rich and powerful sexual abusers.

Lennox has every sympathy with the killer and would rather focus on his customary task of nabbing paedophiles, but nevertheless deigns to investigate.

The trail gets him tangled up with the trans-rights movement and the “coalition of toxic, mentally unstable, needy and highly sexist men” who have “hijacked” it; but the real villain, as ever, is the Establishment class, which is busy fleecing working people whenever it’s not covering up for the depravity of its members.

It is always a pleasure to spend time with the chaotic, damaged, noble Lennox. But although the exaggerated violence and scatology of this book just about rescue the plot from descending into cliché, they also bring it closer at times to parody than gritty realism, and the soap opera convolutions of Lennox’s love life add a further veneer of unreality. The jet-black jokes kept me happily turning the pages, but this sequel lacks the magic that had me urging Crime on all my friends.