In a city of six million surveillance cameras, how do you disappear? This is the problem confronting Adam Kindred, the hapless meteorologist at the centre of William Boyd's jaunty and involving new novel, after a chance meeting with a stranger in a café ends with the stranger expiring messily in a hotel room and Kindred's prints on the knife. I say ‘ends’, but Boyd gets this notable coup de théâtre out of the way by page 8. The rest of the book chronicles Kindred’s disappearance, disguise, flight, recovery and revenge.

Ordinary Thunderstorms, like Boyd’s last book, Relentless, is a thriller: and if the paperback doesn’t end up plastered with words like ‘rollicking’ and ‘pageturner’, I’ll eat my hat. It’s what happens when a writer who no longer needs to prove anything turns his considerable talents to honing that