In the latest of Christopher Brookmyre's comic crime novels, Jack Parlabane, his perennial antihero (investigative journalist, foul-mouthed antiestablishmentarian and semi-crook), quickly informs the reader that he is dead: the victim of a four-storey fall from a window. Narrating (from a hazy afterlife) the events that led to this, he recounts how he was enlisted to help a team of academics testing the supposed paranormal powers of a charismatic American psychic, Gabriel Lafayette, a man Parlabane found charming and funny "until he started trying to kill me". Against the backdrop of Glasgow's historic Kelvin University, an ingeniously twisted plot then unrolls.

Lafayette and his sidekick "Easy" Mather have, it emerges, found an impressive list of targets for evil schemes they have in mind. There's Bryant Lemuel, a furniture magnate who wants to fund a Spiritual Science Chair; Jillian Noble, a tabloid journalist married to a successful new Labour politician; Michael Loftus, a science undergraduate and "female-repellent uber-geek" and his psychologist mother who has an intriguingly equivocal attitude to the scams she knows how to discredit; and fellow student Laura Bailey who becomes the rogues' innocent victim. The academic setting is gracefully rendered; a dinner party preoccupied with intellectual arm-wrestling over rival methodologies is all too plausible.

Brookmyre captures the different voices of his characters with accomplished ease. Jillian's tone of earnest credulity is as horribly amusing as her readiness to inform the university's dean of science that Heisenberg was "the German pioneer of quantum mechanics". Jack's disdainful, scatological language is full of cheerful comic invention. He describes how belief in ghostly communication is "still clinging on to the hairy ring of human comprehension" where "the lavvy paper of reason just can't quite wipe it off". Lafayette's nemesis is a dope-smoking, dialect-grunting, recording engineer; he has a real name but "even the guy's mother called him Spammy".

As the narrative angles shift, we see that controversies about the paranormal spring from different attitudes to reality. Granting the irrationalists their say, and allowing them to seem plausible in what they claim, Brookmyre conducts the argument in public view. He plays with the ironic observation that while the old conjurors pretended they were doing magic, modern paranormalists claim they're producing a "paradigm shift" within science. There is an excellent treatment of the psychology of willing self-deception, including that of the reader who is constantly and pleasantly misled.

The comedy has plenty of serious implications. Brookmyre's skill in crafting the story out of bluffs and double-bluffs ensures that it's more than a metaphysical jeu d'esprit masquerading as a thriller. The villains fit into a real world containing political and religious interest groups who want to influence what children are taught about life and death, belief and evidence. Spiritualism isn't just a cult, it's a "franchise". Partisans of "intelligent design" lurk in the wings. The "unsinkable rubber ducks" is the magician James Randi's phrase for the eternally credulous. Brookmyre writes in the admirable Scots tradition of the sceptic David Hume, and can honourably claim membership in "the Occam's Razor gang".

ATTACK OF THE UNSINKABLE RUBBER DUCKS
Little, Brown £16.99 pp352
Buy the book here at the offer price of £15.29 (inc p&p)