Crime writing is a very broad church these days.

Psychological thrillers, serial killer gore-fests, suburban lives blighted by dark secrets, it all gets filed on the rapidly expanding and ever-popular crime shelves in the bookstores.

At the heart of the genre is the police procedural - the meticulous investigation of a crime, usually featuring a brilliant but flawed maverick copper who throws the rulebook out of the windows to the exasperation of their strait-laced bosses, but always comes up with the goods.

It's in this sub-genre that former West Yorkshire Crown Prosecution Service lawyer John Connor works, and his third book featuring Detective Constable Karen Sharpe is AChild's Game, following on from his 2004 debut Phoenix and its follow-up The Playroom.

Connor has loaded Sharpe with more emotional and psychological baggage than most coppers get. Like Inspector Morse, she appreciates a good drink - but you were unlikely to find Endeavour bingeing on doublefigure pints of Beamish and waking up with the hangover from hell, as Sharpe often did.

She also has a rather colourful past, which shouldn't be discussed here for fear of spoiling the first novel for those who haven't yet read it, and The Playroom saw the hard-nosed yet vulnerable CID officer having the kind of major fall-out with her superiors which makes Jack Frost's headto-heads with his bosses seem like school-yard squabbles.

A Child's Game is set, as is its predecessors, around familiar West Yorkshire locations. On New Year's Eve at the turn of the millennium, a wealthy property developer dies when he is doused with petrol, set alight, and thrown from the ninth floor of a luxury Leeds penthouse flat.

It's at this point that you'd expect Karen Sharpe to make her appearance, especially as the dead man's lover and her daughter appear to have been kidnapped and are being held at gunpoint somewhere nearby.

But Sharpe is missing. Eighteen months after walking out on her boss Pete Bains, she seems to have disappeared for real, and now she's being looked for by the security services.

So it's down to Bains to handle the investigation himself, and as the labyrinthine plot cleverly unfolds it appears that Karen is not only closer than he thinks, she's also got strong links to the murder which threaten her own life.

Connor's suitably confident in both his own abilities and the strength of the characters to allow Sharpe to not appear in most of the novel although her presence constantly hovers over the narrative and the actions of other people.

Connor expertly weaves in his knowledge of the legal system but never hits you over the head with it - by the time you finish a Karen Sharpe book you'll be surprised at how much information has lodged in your brain via the writer's subtle osmosis.

He also paints a credible picture of the county in all its glory - from the countryside to the urban sprawl, from how the other half live to the depths of the gutter.

It's not surprising that the Karen Sharpe adventures are already in development as a TV series. As one of the most well-rounded characters in crime fiction, she's deftly written by Connor, who now lives in Brussels, and - if the right actress is found to portray her on the small screen - will surely become one of the great TV 'tecs and give Connor the wider audience he deserves.

But until then, the source material is more than adequate and Connor's inside knowledge of the judicial system coupled with his gritty, fastpaced narratives and believable characters make for an edgy and downright modern crime series which deserves to be a classic of the genre.

A Child's Game by John Connor is published now by Orion Books priced at £9.99.