Cheerfully amoral Confidence by Ben Richards

A man sits in a London bar reading Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square. In a moment, two thugs will enter and pour petrol over him, then threaten him with a cigarette lighter if he doesn't give them money. He greets this threat with a smile, and is on the verge of being torched when a woman claiming to be an undercover police officer intervenes and saves his life.

The police officer is in fact a struggling actress, the "victim" a con artist who has ripped the two men off and blown their cash. So begins this most contemporary of morality tales, a novel which sets out to prod our notions of guilt and innocence at every turn. The character who does most of the prodding, so to speak, is the Patrick Hamilton-reading con artist Evan. It is his purpose to tempt Kerenza, the struggling actress, to become his accomplice and to gain a more profitable return on her talents.

Evan is an enigmatic figure from the start. A proud Welsh nihilist who believes capitalism has flattened the moral high-ground. "Talk about rights is nonsense, talk of human rights is nonsense on stilts," he says, paraphrasing Jeremy Bentham. Like the best literary tempters, he is both apple and serpent. We are repelled and attracted simultaneously, just as we are unsure whether to cheer or boo for Kerenza, the heroine who is soon aware that she has become the "little Mrs Faust" too easily tempted by "Mr Mephistopheles".

Indeed, from the start we are aware of Kerenza's muddy morals. "I'm a street girl," she justifies. "A smart girl, not Netta Longdon but Becky Sharp, cheerfully amoral but not bad at heart."

Kerenza, like the unscrupulous Netta in Hangover Square, is a failed actress who has run out of choices. She is a warmer figure than the callous Netta but like her represents the city she inhabits. Just as Hamilton wanted Netta to represent the corruption of thirties London - you only have to take the g out of her surname to get this point - so does Richards use Kerenza's story to ask questions about a society where humans are reduced to consumers.

Inevitably, Kerenza is attracted to Evan's world-view - attracted enough not only to slide into his bed, but also to become his employee. As his assistant she helps him squeeze money out of a group of "posh druggies", who are planning to run the London marathon dressed as chavs. Evan's scam involves getting them to pour sponsorship money into a fictitious charity, the "Taylor Bright Foundation".

We never lose sympathy for Kerenza because she is too complex, too human, to be a straightforward anti-heroine. When she isn't conning gullible trustafarians, she is earning karma points by caring for an old disabled lady named after Kerenza's most desired virtue, Grace. It is in these chapters that Richards, appropriately, exhibits a stylistic grace of his own.

The constellations of bluebells in Kew Gardens are compared to "the glitter glimpsed from a plane landing at night in a foreign city - every tiny light a home". Kerenza imagines the tiny roots of each flower "clasping the earth like a baby's fingers". With other writers, this sudden contraction from "city" through "home" to the grip of a "baby's fingers" could become a car-crash of competing similes. With Richards it provides a stylistic echo of his entire purpose. In Confidence, private worlds are always intrinsically tied to a larger canvas.

Indeed, Richards is a novelist who has always managed to weave the personal with the political. For instance, in The Mermaid and the Drunks, the Chilean setting provided lots of excuses to discuss problems sparked by Pinochet's regime. In Confidence, however, the social critique never feels like a digression. Here, the moral questions are the story and so merge seamlessly with the action. The novel is the perfect showcase for Richards' formidable talents, matching the political bite he has often displayed in his novels with the knack of creating sharp, fast-paced narratives such as those he's given us on TV (Spooks and No Angels).

In Confidence, he shows that he is a writer who, like Hamilton, understands that accessible storytelling can not only incorporate political themes, but can also do so without stylistic sacrifices. The result is a treat. A sexy, tightly buckled thriller bulging with action and ideas, matched with authorial grace and, yes, confidence.