After the Man Before Alan Mahar Methuen, 246pp, £12.99 ISBN 0413771466

Alan Mahar's follow-up to his striking debut, Flight Patterns, is set in the less-than-glamorous location of 1980s Birmingham. It is the back end of Thatcherism and the onset of West Midlands urban renewal, a time when houses became investments rather than homes. Cue social worker Elizabeth who, with the help of her sister and a loan from her dying father, sets about turning her newly purchased house from a dilapidated mess into a dream home.

Rather than seek the help of professionals, she turns to Richard, an artist of dubious talent and even more dubious mental stability, whom she meets by chance one afternoon. Richard, as it turns out, is no skilled builder, having spent much of his adult life in care centres. He proves to be as unstable as the foundations of the house itself.

More appealing is Elizabeth, a social worker with more vulnerabilities than most of her clients. Her father is dying, she has a difficult sister, a disparaging boyfriend and a new house with a dark secret. She moves around in a nebulous swirl of stress. Her salvation lies, she believes, in her newly acquired home, the transformation of which offers her a renewed sense of purpose and an escape from a difficult past.

Mysterious pasts are inevitable in novels such as this. Mahar enlivens a contemporary cliche by making the house itself, rather than any individual, the focal point of suspicion.

The "man before" of the title has left numerous letters beneath the skirting boards of the house, which offer an account of his life when he lived there. Richard discovers these letters, which are interspersed throughout the novel, providing a dramatic counterpoint to the main narrative. The letters are the work of a disturbed man: he beats his wife and children, is obsessed with his model railway, and is the proud owner of a firearm.

Regular visits from neighbours help Elizabeth to reconstruct the history of her new house and those who lived there before she came, a process that runs in tandem with Richard's efforts to revitalise it aesthetically. Not only can the walls hear, they can speak, too.

There is much to commend here, not least the subtle writing, the precisely paced narrative and the authentic dialogue. But in straining for originality, the novel sometimes lacks cohesion. Like the Birmingham of today, parts of this book are hugely impressive, whereas others are perhaps best avoided altogether.

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