A good maze to be lost in

Fiction: Now you see it, now you don't. For all the trickery there is also a great deal of artful control and invention at work in Louise Welsh's dazzling third book, The Bullet Trick. Set in Berlin, Glasgow and London, it has so much going on in it that the slightest blink could prove expensive, leaving a reader to wander in the maze of sub-plots and complications.

Still, as mazes go, this is a good one to be lost in. Few contemporary novelists write as well as Welsh, and even fewer British writers stand equal to her narrative ease. Of the standing army of gifted Scottish storytellers, Welsh - whose reputation was brilliantly consolidated by Tamburlaine Must Die (2004), told through the voice of the doomed Elizabethan playwright, spy and sometime criminal, Christopher Marlowe - could well prove the best of the lot, AL Kennedy included.

William Wilson is a magician - or to be more accurate, a rather shabby variety artist who is no longer as young as he thought he was and whose famous grin is no longer quite as effective. He is finally admitting that he no longer resembles his publicity shots. Securing engagements is not easy and old Rich, his agent, treats him more like a somewhat embarrassing relative than a client. It wasn't always like that:

"Once upon a time Rich had thought I might be in the new wave of conjurers, 'the post-Paul Daniels brigade' he called them. These days we weren't close, but he let me call his answerphone direct."

Wilson is an engaging, rueful narrator with a bizarre story so unbelievable that even he has difficulty believing it. He is also quite funny, as dry as only a depressed, world-weary character inevitably becomes (when a girl asks him if he has a rabbit, he replies: "Aye, but he's invisible.")

From the opening sentence, it is obvious that this is a tale about seedy mishaps and people gone badly wrong. The narrator, our anti-hero in a book of baddies, wakes up as an aeroplane touches down. The female passenger beside him congratulates him for sleeping the sleep of the dead. Wilson tells his story with the degree of detail expected of someone who has had time to think and rethink. When recalling his encounter with the girl who inquired about his rabbit, he says of himself: "I was aiming for the avuncular, but it sounded like a line that Crippen might have used." Later, on being asked by his agent if he has a passport, Wilson says: "Somewhere, why? Someone want to buy it?" The passport inquiry is not random; it becomes central to the main plot.

There is a job going in a Berlin nightclub and it may be the beginning of a turnaround in Wilson's fortunes. "The man who ran the cabaret in Berlin was a German called Ray . . . He looked me up and down . . . He shook his head sadly and smiled like a man who had faced enough disappointments to know that he would face many more."

There may be an awareness of Christopher Isherwood's Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939), but Welsh is not attempting period pastiche. Her setting is contemporary without topicality, and she has no need to borrow from anyone. Her narrative succeeds through its unfortunate narrator and Wilson's laconic irony is impressively consistent.

In developing Wilson's character, Welsh also allows him to fantasise about various young women. All of this is convincing and even rather touching, and balances the sharpness of the dialogue, much of which is quite aggressive.

Although The Bullet Trick is a thriller that rattles along by force of narrative, it is also a portrait of one man's life going nowhere quickly. The Berlin sequences are alive with comic touches. But whenever it seems the narrative is preparing to settle, Welsh tosses more mayhem into the mix.

Wilson turns amateur detective and attempts to unravel an old crime, the disappearance of a woman whose body was never found. He decides to meet the presumably dead woman's sibling:

For a woman whose sister had disappeared without trace from her own home in the middle of the day Sheila Bowen was remarkably lax about security. I gave her a big smile and one of the business cards that I'd made in a machine at the railway station, identifying me as Will Gray, freelance journalist. She glanced at it casually then invited me in.

If there is one liberating element that dances through this yarn, it is Welsh's graceful, near-conversational narrative ease. It is true that this book has not just appeared from nowhere. Welsh established herself quickly with her debut novel, The Cutting Room (2002). That she was talented was obvious and she was duly chosen on the Guardian's list of Britain's Best First Novelists. Yet even that first show of assured promise did not prepare one for the explosive grandeur that would flourish two years later in Tamburlaine Must Die.

Based on the audacious life and violent death (aged 29) in 1593 of the Elizabethan playwright, Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine Must Die is breathtaking and horrifically, explicitly beautiful. "I have four candles and one evening in which to write this account," begins Marlowe, aware that his life is virtually over. "Tomorrow I will lodge these papers with my last true friend."

The book is a celebration of a great English genius, yet Welsh is writing neither a love letter nor a eulogy. It is a tough, lyric masterwork, in which she uses her flair for describing the essential criminality in human behaviour. Her Marlowe is an artist and a thug, and also a fatalist half in love with his own folly ("It is death that gives a shape to life").

While Wilson, in The Bullet Trick, is a no-hoper who suddenly finds himself playing dangerous games with people who are far less innocent than he is, Welsh's Marlowe moves in criminal circles and is no stranger to bad behaviour. The playwright's genius did not save him, but it did allow him to live longer than he might have. As he ponders the River Thames, he vows "that if I were murdered, to drag my dead body from whatever grave it were thrown in and hound my foes beyond mercy".

Welsh tracks Marlowe through his final days. It is a deathbed soliloquy played out in the streets and lanes of a London dogged by the Plague.

In that earlier book, admittedly a novella based on a real-life character whose death remains the subject of historical dispute, Welsh displayed a mastery of prose that defied mere pastiche. Her lively new book is in some ways more ambitious, although its squalor is less atmospheric. It revolves around magic and distorted mirrors as well as the trials and tribulations of a man who can no longer call on his only asset, youthful charm. Now you see it, now you don't, this is a highly possible Booker-bound thriller that keeps its secrets and tricks and, above all, its reader, hectically on the run.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

The Bullet Trick By Louise Welsh Canongate, 363pp. £12.99