The cover of Adam Ross’ first novel is swathed in praise from no lesser lights than Stephen King and Michiko Kakutani. The title page features a reproduction of Escher’s “Mobius” flagging the role of the double in the plot. All the signs point towards a serious literary work, dark and twisted.

And Mr Peanut is indeed a disturbing book, opening as it does with a husband plotting to kill his wife. David is a successful games designer, working secretly away on a first-person novel. He’s become tired of his life and is struggling in his relationship with his obese wife. Barely 20 pages in, David is sitting in an interrogation room, the detectives having concluded he’s killed Alice. Not least of their evidence is David’s novel in which the protagonist, David, hires a hitman to murder his wife, Alice.

To further complicate matters, David’s questioner is Sam Sheppard, a fictionalised version of the 20th-century American doctor who was convicted of brutally murdering his wife, but was then acquitted after 10 years in prison. In Mr Peanut, Sheppard has turned detective and judges David to be “guilty, guilty as sin”.

His characters are people we know; their internal lives are fully formed. Each of them is at the centre of their own universe. The exception to this is Alice who always feels a little under-realised. But perhaps this is intentional given this is a book about marriage, its overwhelming intimacies and irrevocable distances. It seems Alice remains something of a shell because David is never quite able to comprehend all of her.

The novel spirals in on itself, winding tight like a slinky as the final third returns us to David’s meta-fictional project; his novel, and Alice’s remarkable transformation shedding tens of kilograms and the days that lead up to her death.

While the plot is twisty and the devices self-proclaiming, I prefer to read an exciting project — a suggestion for the future of the novel — as Ross offers here. For the first time in a while, reading this debut novel made me feel as if I’d struck on something new. This is a genuinely scintillating read.