Adultery and betrayal have always been richly rewarding subjects in fiction, as John Lanchester’s Look What You Made Me Do confirms. Set in contemporary London and featuring architect-designed homes, book groups and the Oxbridge-educated middle-class, it comes perilously close to being that dread thing, a Hampstead novel – only to subvert it.

For after one chapter, Kate’s husband Jack is dead. Her long marriage and comfortable life are cast into turmoil, first by bereavement and then by a hit TV series which suggests that Jack had been having an affair with its scriptwriter, Phoebe. Interleaved with Kate’s account of agonised grieving is the TV script of Cheating. It soon becomes clear that what Kate initially presents to us as a happy, bourgeois marriage had some ‘kinky treats’ in it, titillating the show’s huge audience, but privately excruciating to her. Jack has not only betrayed their partnership but their private jokes about, and tastes in, sex. Yet something is missing from the picture. As Kate unravels the clues, a psychological thriller emerges.

Not since Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier has there been such a nasty little tale about a marriage

Lanchester captures the spiky inner voices of his two female narrators with considerable success. Kate is almost stereotypical of a woman at the tail-end of the Boomer generation, pumped full of sexual and intellectual self-confidence, complaining of her mother’s toxic narcissism while displaying a good deal herself. An English literature graduate, she has prospered by marrying a successful architect and is sufficiently self-aware to admit that her thoughts about her friends are often ‘cruel, or mean-spirited, or at the very least unfair and inappropriate’.

We learn how the undergraduate Kate seduced Jack away from his girlfriend at Oxford University, causing the latter to have a nervous breakdown and leave without a degree. Kate’s contempt for her vanquished rival and her success at manipulating Jack is overweening. ‘When I see something I want… I will take it. And that was what I felt about Jack,’ she tells us. Her adversary, Phoebe, 25 years younger, is just as ruthless. ‘Writing is all about control,’ she muses. Her agent tells her she’s a bit of a bully with a dark side, an ‘edge of voyeurism’ and amorality, which makes her work perfect for TV drama. In fact these two women sound so alike that it’s hard to put a hair between them.

Being a millennial gives Phoebe many reasons to hate older people, and from the start Kate perceives

the intergenerational dislike of a mid-thirties person… seeing a complacent affluence, an unearned self-confidence and assuredness, born of… having cruised through life sitting on the great sofa of baby boomer entitlement and economic good fortune.

But there is another very personal motivation which the alert reader may guess long before it is revealed. When Kate works out what has really happened and why, she goes after her tormentor. The gloves are off, and there can be only one winner.

Not since Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier has there been such a nasty little tale about a marriage. Less witty than Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure, less satirical than Capital, and less cynical than The Wall, this latest novel nevertheless shimmers with the author’s characteristic black humour. Its pacing and suspense mean that you are captivated by a high-wire act between literary and commercial fiction, and only on reflection does it feel a more sordid story. Jack and Kate are childless through choice, which in their case suggests that they have never grown into the bigger people that they might have become through parenthood. Two damaged and damaging mothers in the background add to the feeling that the real problem for these characters is not mortality so much as lives not lived.

As its title (a favourite phrase of abusers) suggests, the plot is largely about gaslighting. Kate appears to be the liberal, community-minded one in the marriage, but it is Jack, for all his pretensions, who has a private, charitable side. He actively cares about a local rough sleeper and lost young woman, and it is a pity that this aspect of his character is not explored further. One would also have liked Phoebe to have been given greater depth and dimension. The thriller plot takes over and, despite the satisfactions of a cruel revenge, the ending feels rushed as well as unjust to the one innocent person in the story.

Of course, this cat-and-mouse game between two clever, sardonic women protagonists will be devoured by streaming audiences as well as book groups. But those of us who admire the author’s non-fiction as well as his fiction will hope that next time he is slightly less dazzling and digs deeper into the human heart.