Dangerous Data by Junior Adam Lury and Simon Gibson | £9.99 Banta

A verb has entered the lexicon of the New York singles scene recently: "google". You meet someone, swap numbers, fix a date, then Google them through 1,346,966,000 web pages. Maybe their name will crop up as a Nobel prize nominee. Or maybe on a sex offenders' register in Arizona.

But suppose you want to take it further. Would you want to see their police file? Their medical records? Would you want to know who they phone or which corners of the internet they visit at night? Or how often they bought condoms last month? Arthur C Dogg, the narrator of Adam Lury and Simon Gibson's debut novel, is a data detective. Using the weapons of the hacker, he can access and cross-reference information from at least 200 different databases.

Employed by a mysterious client to investigate an address, the scraps of data he gathers join up like a huge game of dot-to-dot. The emerging picture reveals a frighteningly detailed, sordid scene of infidelity, drugs, dark secrets and suspicious deaths.

Dogg is a new breed of gumshoe, and Dangerous Data is a new breed of thriller. It is suitably gripping, told cleverly on alternating pages - Dogg's notes fill the left: bald "facts" pulled from databases and credit card transactions occupy the right. And it is terrifyingly convincing.

Data detectives really are out there, presumably using these precise illegal methods. Professional ad-men Lury and Gibson are not paranoid young conspiracy nuts, either. Lury sits on the government's thinktank on data protection. It is much more interesting than a straightforward panic attack about the end of privacy. Dogg is not only a detective, he is also a philosopher of the information revolution. Drawing on ideas from Bentham and McLuhan, and cultural reference points as varied as Shakespeare and Courtney Love, he sketches a morality for the post-privacy era. "It is the desire to know that makes us human," he posits. "And unhappy."

The answer, he suggests, is to worry less about the desire to keep information free, as "it isn't privacy that protects... it's trust that protects". Our society has yet to recognise that "data protection" is an oxymoron. If this novel helps awaken us to that truth, then it has to be welcomed. I doubt there will be a more important novel published this year.