NORTHERN Ireland seems to attract thriller writers like a cow pat attracts flies. The place has many of those qualities that go into the making of a good novel in this genre - history, divided loyalties, paramilitaries, espionage, dirty tricks, assassination, mayhem. The list goes on. And if the ending of the Cold War means that Moscow or Berlin are no longer available, there is always Belfast.

The Albert Clock may not be as exotic as Checkpoint Charlie, but it does have the advantage of being familiar, seen on our television screens most nights of the week.

Unfortunately, most of these novels are so awful that one weeps for the long suffering natives of Northern Ireland who have done nothing to have this garbage written in their name. Many appear to have been penned by people with absolutely no knowledge of the place beyond a road map and a cursory weekend at Belfast's Europa Hotel. There is an absence of imagination.

Characters are wooden, the paramilitaries are mindless psychopaths, the SAS are Boy's Own heros, plot is implausible, dialogue is mind stunningly unbelievable and geography is non existent. So it is in fear and trembling that I normally approach any thriller set north of Newry.

Keith Baker's debut novel is a breathtaking exception. He comes racing out of the traps with a book that is possibly the best of its kind to be written so far about the North. He comes with one big advantage. He was born in Northern Ireland and has spent his working life as a journalist with the Belfast Telegraph and the BBC. So at least he knows the place. He has also brought a wonderfully refreshing originality to the Northern Ireland thriller, and he has that essential gift - the man can write.

He sets his novel in the future, 20 years after the Troubles have ended, when a new order is struggling to establish itself and old ghosts from the past threaten to tear it apart and unleash mere anarchy.

Jack McCallan is a young man making his way in London who comes into money when his father - a retired RUC man dies suddenly in a gas explosion at his holiday home in Donegal. McCallan comes back to Belfast for the funeral and begins to find that things are a little odd.

Why has his father got religious in his old age? Why do people at the funeral talk about him as if he was a hero? And what is the importance of a £100,000 bequest in his will to a mysterious woman living in Malahide, Co Dublin?

As McCallan begins to ask the questions that any son would, he starts to uncover a plot, long laid forest, of the unorthodox murder of IRA and Sinn Fein activists by a rogue element in the RUC impatient to speed the peace process to a successful conclusion.

His inquiries stir old fears and bring into play establishment forces that would prefer if things were left unexplored. People are making money out of the peace. The past is another country. Who will rid us of this troublesome son?

McCallan is the perfect hero. He is an ordinary guy caught up in extraordinary events. This is no James Bond with the golden gun, no superman who, with one flash of Kryptonite, can scatter his foes. This is a decent Joe, and the reader identifies easily with him.

This novel is a great read, a page turner that hooks the reader from the first sentence. If you buy no other thriller this year, buy this one.