It's pretty rough, being the protagonist of an Ally Kennen novel. You get dealt a lousy hand; then, just when you think you're playing it fairly well, some joker comes along and raises the stakes to a deadly level. This time, the beleaguered hero is 16-year-old Michael "Scrappy" Singer, who lives in grubby accommodation above the family business, which is a junkyard. There's never any proper food in the place. His mum has absconded, and his elder sister is eager to do likewise. His oil-stained dad is depressed in a volatile sort of way and, worse, wears his hair in a ponytail. His granddad, Ted, has dementia.

So far, so bad. But then someone starts texting Scrappy dares. At first they're weird but achievable, and because there are financial rewards attached Scrappy rises  or sinks  to the challenge. Inevitably though, the dares turn sinister and, eventually, lethal. And the texter is also a stalker. This is all excellent, page-turning stuff, and the denouement, while subtly prefigured, is a genuine shock.

Kennen is never coy when it comes to deploying symbols. What she does, usually and rather brilliantly, is invert their normal associations; in Bedlam, for example, an asylum becomes a place of terrifying insecurity. In Quarry, images of wreck and decay are everywhere and seemingly unambiguous: the scrapyard itself, Ted's squalid cottage, pile-ups on the nearby M5, plants stunted by carbon monoxide, a decrepit school building infested by cockroaches. Nature itself is hostile. Rain of biblical duration threatens to flood the town. Signals of hope or renewal are either out of sight (we never visit the new school campus) or thwarted (a new housing development has run out of money). A huge stag makes a startling appearance, like an animistic deity, but he too is being stalked. Inevitably, and soon, his magnificently antlered head will be mounted on a plaque. The only source of succour and sanctuary is (a recurring Kennen theme, this) the family. Unfortunately the family isn't Scrappy's; it's that of his friend, Silva.

From all that, you may conclude that Quarry is unremittingly bleak. Yet it doesn't read that way. In part this is due to Kennen's narrative method. As always, she writes in the first person and the present tense. This is a risky technique because it tends towards the Twitterish. "Now I'm cycling home feeling breathless and happy," Scrappy tells us at one point. But in Quarry the combination of point of view and pace urges the reader so swiftly on that there simply isn't time for the novel's Grand Guignol imagery to become ponderous. Moreover, Kennen seems to have throttled back slightly on the angst. Scrappy is rather less isolated than the heroes of her first three books. Like them, he has burdensome adult responsibilities, but he is neither friendless nor adrift.

In the final scene, themes of ruin and redemption come together in a metaphor which, in true Kennen style, manages to be simultaneously ironic and uplifting. At the heart of the scrapyard there's the corpse of an aircraft. (It's a Fokker Friendship, which is unsubtle, but one can understand why Kennen found it irresistible.) Scrappy and his senile grandfather sit in the remains of the cockpit, run the instrument check, flip the ignition switches, and imagine themselves taxiing through the gates of the yard and into the sky.

Kennen's last book  Sparks, an exuberant tale of unorthodox funerary arrangements  was written for younger readers. Quarry will reassure her older fans that her grip on noir is as muscular as ever.

Mal Peet's Exposure (Walker) won the Guardian Children's Fiction prize 2009.