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I have to confess I'm a sucker for a good conspiracy thriller, the more paranoid the better, and Paul Adam delivers with this fast-paced and eminently believable tale which lacks only the recently-added government hammer of anti-terror legislation (by which some 568 people were recently arrested at the Labour Party Conference in Brighton) to be totally up to date.

University lecturer Tom Whitehead leads a boring sort of life in a city much like Sheffield, until one day he awakes to find himself arrested, in the full view of assembled media, for possessing child pornography on his computer. Faced with one of those crimes where you are guilty until proven innocent, Whitehead's life appears to be crumbling, until he finally discovers a credit card charge which proves he could not have been on his computer. It soon becomes obvious he is being stitched up, by person or persons official, but why? The obvious motive might be Tom's research into the miners' strikes of the 1980s, but that leads by coincidence to the real cause, and if it all seems a bit too close to the film Defense of the Realm, well, I'm willing to cut Adam some slack. Partly because he's very good indeed in the subtleties of a relationship coming apart at the seams of suspicion and doubt, and on the smug ruthlessness of the police, always willing to aid the powerful in stitching up the ordinary, as if that somehow protected them.

If there is perhaps an element of deus ex machina about Tom's private detective ally, or exactly which elements of life are watched and which aren't, that's a small price to pay for a thriller that is cleanly written, with distinct characters and a plot that hangs together right through to the end. Apart perhaps from at least one unfingered culprit. But that, I'm afraid - and paranoia - is reality. Just count those cameras watching you when you go out tomorrow.