The provocative mystery at the heart of Jenny Downham's novel makes this a particularly sharp-edged love story. For Mikey and Ellie, no decision is going to be an easy one; loyalties may be shattered, and loved ones will undoubtedly get hurt. It's a novel about making the right choices and how difficult they can sometimes be.

Mikey is finding it tough to keep his family afloat. He has ambitions to be a chef, but his father is out of the picture and his mother is an alcoholic who spends much of her time in bed. Mikey ends up bearing the weight of responsibility for his two sisters, young Holly and 15-year-old Karyn. When Karyn claims she's been raped by an older boy at a party, Mikey feels he's the one who must deliver some kind of justice for her. Initially he's keen to use his fists.

Ellie lives with her brother, Tom, and their parents behind an electronically locked gate. But the family's bubble of middle-class security is dramatically burst when Tom is accused of Karyn's rape. He denies everything. Karyn was drunk, she offered it to him on a plate, he says. She only cried rape the next morning after sobering up and feeling embarrassed and snubbed when he no longer wanted her. Ellie loves her brother, and of course wants to defend him.

Mikey and Ellie should hate each other; they should share the bitterness and resentment that their respective families do. Instead, they fall in love.

In places the novel has all the intensity and pace of the best crime thrillers, as readers are forced to wrestle with the moral ambiguities right alongside the characters. How should we view date rape? Who exactly is capable of rape?

Downham highlights the fact that horrendous crimes have far-reaching consequences, affecting not only the victim and the accused but families, friends and society as a whole. Unfortunately Karyn's character, as the victim, doesn't feel as fully developed as her brother's. She is too often just out of the picture, cocooned in her bedroom or locked in the bathroom. We feel for Karyn, but we don't ever get to know her well. Similarly Tom, who is the most complex character here. He's good-looking, relatively wealthy and intelligent. He can be funny and loving in his sister's company. What are his motivations? I was anxious to understand him, yet too much was left unexplored.

But this is Mikey and Ellie's book. This is their romance. It's a beautifully balanced novel with the darkness of the central crime never forgotten or over-sweetened by the love story.

In many ways it seems to be quite a traditionally structured romance: bad lad from the tough side of the tracks goes good to win the girl. But perhaps Downham wants to subvert that old cliché. Perhaps it's the good girl who has to forsake the most to win the boy. And despite the crime and punishment aspect of the novel never being fully resolved, readers wanting to discover if the relationship overcomes all the odds are sure to find themselves provoked, moved and rewarded in equal measure.