Set in the last decade of the 18th century, Janet Ellis’s appealing debut novel is like a cross between Fanny Burney’s Evelina and US crime drama Dexter.

Nineteen-year-old Anne Jacobs is an intelligent girl in a world that doesn’t value such virtues. Her father is a boor with no time for books (though she does catch him secreting a copy of Fanny Hill in his drawer) or for daughters. Her mother is a shadow in her own home, weakened by a series of stillbirths. Anne feels she is being punished for being the one who survived.

While her father wants to marry her off to the smarmy Onions – a foppish schemer straight out of a Gillray cartoon – Anne finds herself attracted to the illiterate butcher’s boy, Fub. They begin a flirtation but her desires begin to overtake her, leading her to perform increasingly callous acts. Her capacity for cruelty, though, is tempered by naivety, an emotional vulnerability that comes from having led so sheltered a life.

Ellis excels at the poetics of flesh. She writes with a keen eye for the texture of skin and the meat beneath. She vividly describes the slaughter of a calf, the wet thwack of the knife, the cleaving of muscle from bone, the hot rush of blood. Anne, we come to realise, is something of a sociopath. This is where The Butcher’s Hook gets really interesting – and yes, there’s something satisfying about the fact that this blood-splattered narrative sprang from the mind of Janet Ellis, the one-time Blue Peter presenter.

The novel’s structure is somewhat lopsided – it takes a long time getting to the meaty stuff, so to speak – and Ellis’s descriptive skills actually end up getting in the way, working against the momentum of the story. But there’s a wit and a richness to the writing, a nice way with pastiche, and a real feel for the macabre. And, in Anne, she has created an engaging and at times daringly amoral heroine.

The Butcher’s Hook is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£7.99). Click here to buy it for £6.55