I don’t know how I’ve missed reading a book by Jodi Picoult till now. She has been on my radar ever since I read her comments some years ago about the US literary establishment’s treatment of popular fiction written by women. Yet it took one of the members of my Facebook book group to highly recommend her latest novel, Leaving Time, for me to track down her books on the library shelves. The Tenth Circle, published in 2006, was the one I came home with.

Reading The Tenth Circle gave me the same pleasure that I used to derive from the best of Dean Koontz and Stephen King. Immediately, I felt myself to be in the hands of a gifted storyteller who combines readability, powerful emotion and a fascination with the nature of evil.

The Tenth Circle is all about evil – or, to put it differently, it dramatises the clash between an individual’s wants and needs and those of others; and the limits to which ordinary people might go to save face, to hide from the truth, or to protect themselves or those they love. It uses the trope of a comic book artist who brings to life in a graphic novel a modern-day version of Dante’s trip to the nine circles of hell. Aspects of the artist’s life are reflected in each of the circles. These include what happens to his fourteen-year-old daughter after she tries to get back together with her ex-boyfriend at a friend’s party; the artist’s rocky relationship with his unhappy English-professor wife (who teaches Dante); and the secrets of his troubled childhood growing up as the only white boy in a Yup’ik village in Alaska.

The setting shifts from small-town Maine where everyone knows everyone else’s business, to an even smaller town in Alaska, a desolate but beautiful place which promises escape, tragedy or redemption. The Tenth Circle is a murder mystery, a coming-of-age story and a domestic drama. It’s also about metamorphosis, it brings myth to life and questions what it is that makes us human.

The story is gripping, the characters believable and sympathetic. Picoult’s prose is lucid and sometimes displays flashes of poetry than had me wishing I were reading an ebook so I could highlight lines for future reference. It’s the very best kind of popular fiction.

No wonder her books are New York Times best sellers.