Independent on Sunday, The: Books: What happened when the Medusa of Millwall came to Greenland

The figurative cargo of Russell Celyn-Jones's new novel declares itself almost from its opening page. Ray Greenland, his thirtysomething hero, is a Thames pilot employed to guide river craft safe into port. Lily, his reliable though not 100-per-cent faithful wife, runs a dating agency whose patrons can navigate their way towards the haven of emotional security. Behind chugs a flotilla of pre-teen children, Flora and Eliot, Lily's sisters and their spouses, and Ray's in-laws, stroke-felled Aubrey and his abrasive wife Rose, of whose asperities her granddaughter innocently enquires 'Why is Nana so horrible to everyone?'

Ray's personal horizon is crowded out by a single gross impediment. He is, we rapidly learn, a child-murderer, institutionalised throughout his teenage years for having set fire to his younger sister. Finally released into a landscape thronged with eagle-eyed scrutineers liable to remember his face from old newspapers, Ray has been given a new identity and coached by his probation officer in the intricacies of a faked past life. Lily, her husband's lack of relatives explained away by early deaths and fatal accidents, perceives no threat to her settled existence. Ray, alternatively, goes in constant fear of exposure and the vengeful mob.

As if the links with Thames-haunted Dickensian novels such as Our Mutual Friend and (above all) Great Expectations weren't sinewy enough, Celyn- Jones has his man live down by the Kentish marshes at Cooling. Here, above the tables of his favourite local restaurant, rise the first intimations of disquiet, in the shape of a man who claims to remember him from school. Weaselly Miles turns up again a day or so later in a minor car smash, and then, whether by chance or design, at one of Lily's dating seminars. He is accompanied by a spectacular piece of Silvertown flotsam named Celestine, swiftly revealed " to the reader, if not to Ray's polite if puzzled family " as the half-sister who, a quarter-of-a-century back, goaded him on to homicide.

The awful tension that lies at the core of Ten Seconds from the Sun, built around Celestine's insertion of herself into Greenland domestic life (she claims to be his cousin), is not in the least diminished by the back-story uncoiling behind it. Here Ray dilates on his bleak, ground- down childhood in the notional care of a self- made East End property developer who keeps a second mnage down on a river barge of which Celestine is the abused and unhappy product. The present, meanwhile, is threatening to explode. Miles, primed with whisky and persuaded to jump into the Thames, is never seen again, but the Millwall Medusa who blues pounds 2,000 of Ray's money on blackjack and turns up at Aubrey and Rose's anniversary bash to spill her brother's secrets, is not so easily erased.

The faint air of symbolic stage-management that attends much of this (calling members of your cast 'Greenland', for example, or 'Celestine', as in 'Mary Celeste') is heightened by the thought that Ray is more researched than felt: not so much a character in his own right as an intermittently brilliant impersonation of one. On the other hand, Celyn-Jones excels at giving his creations an unheralded extra dimension " making Rose the one family member to stick up for her son-in-law, post-explosion " and in his evocations of a family life thrown mysteriously out of kilter. There is a wonderfully eerie pre-finale in which Ray absconds with the children to explore 'Oystermouth', the scene of his textbook childhood. The ending is very far from what the reader has been encouraged to predict, and the whole an arresting amalgam of anger and unease set in motion by the past's intrusive hand.