A researcher for a medical company called Bioflux calls a journalist friend to tell him of an important story and shortly afterwards is killed in a car crash in an isolated spot near Seattle. The reporter visits the scientist’s widow in equally remote Pryor, Colorado. The reporter and the widow go way back - Lucy was Kevin’s girl until she went off with scientist Carl. Plainly there is a secret involving Bioflux, a secret which was being uncovered by Carl. Now it’s the duty of Kevin and Lucy to finish the job. Into the mix is thrown the corrupt warden of a penitentiary, in which TB tests - and worse - have been conducted on the unwitting inmates; a female ex-con desperate to ensure that her younger sister comes out of the warden’s pen relatively undamaged; hired assassins posing as the FBI; the impact of Gulf War Syndrome; an elite conspiracy which extends all the way to the vice-president (not Dick Cheney).

This may sound like a paranoid bio-thriller - and to an extent Shot is just that - but Jenny Siler’s third novel is grounded in the everyday and the closely observed in a way which male thriller writers rarely manage. In fact, the thriller apparatus of masked intruders, the breaking-and-entering of hi-tech facilities, and sinister hit-men, sometimes sits at a slightly uncomfortable angle to Siler’s eye for the bleak landscape of the mid-west and her skill in creating character. Not that she doesn’t deliver the thrills. But she is as interested in the flawed background to her central trio: Kevin the reporter who lost his job after faking a story about Mexican illegals; Lucy, whose marriage foundered following the death of her baby (a death connected to Carl’s secret work); and Darcy Williams, the tomboyish ex-con whose vulnerable spot is her devotion to her sister Angie. In the end, though justice is done and secrets come out, there is perhaps a slightly perfunctory feel to the resolution to Shot. Overall this is a satisfying and thoughtful read, illuminating rather more of what’s referred to ‘the menace of the American dream’ than we usually get in a conspiracy thriller.