Dr Eitan Rose is stark naked in a gay sauna when he is called upon to perform CPR on an elderly man and fellow patron who is having a heart attack. When arriving paramedics ask Eitan for his details, he declines to give his real name, instead giving them the name of his work supervisor and nemesis, Douglas Moran. Eitan is a hard-partying consultant rheumatologist who has just returned to work after several months off following a mental health crisis, and who uses liquid cocaine secreted into a nasal inhaler to get through the working day.

When Moran dies in unexpected circumstances, Eitan suspects foul play and sets about finding the culprit. Soon he is performing illicit postmortems and impersonating a police detective so he can cross-examine a suspect. But when he tries to blow the whistle, his colleagues and the police decline to take his claims seriously. Eitan may work among medical professionals, but they are not above stigmatising a colleague diagnosed with bipolar disorder and taking his outlandish claims as evidence of his instability.

A Particularly Nasty Case is the first murder mystery from Adam Kay, author of the tragicomic This Is Going to Hurt, his bestselling memoir which recounted his early career as a junior doctor. The Lord of the Rings actor Andy Serkis is the narrator, who revels in Kay’s pitch-black humour and energetically inhabits the wild dysfunction of Eitan. Some suspension of disbelief is required in what is an overly frantic final act. Nonetheless, you can’t help rooting for Eitan, a misguided but ultimately well-intentioned hero and sleuth.

Available via Orion 10hr 9min

Further listening

Frankly
Nicola Sturgeon, Macmillan, 14hr 17min
The former first minister of Scotland reflects on her early life in Ayrshire, leading the yes campaign in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum and her dealings with past and current world leaders including Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. Read by the author.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
Kiran Desai, Penguin Audio, 25hr 31min
Sneha Mathan reads this Booker-nominated novel about love spanning decades and continents. When aspiring novelist Sonia and journalist Sunny have a chance encounter on a train in India, they realise they already have a connection: their families are neighbours.

This collection is a debut – it is also an ending. The poet Gboyega Odubanjo died tragically almost a year ago and the final edit of this extraordinary and arresting book has been overseen by friends, family and his publishers. It is, in one sense, a found poem – or series of poems – about something not a soul would ever wish to find. On 21 September 2001 – anyone alive at that time will remember it – the headless torso of a boy was discovered in the Thames, in the stretch near the Globe theatre, dressed in a pair of orange girls’ shorts. It was police officers who gave him the name of Adam. And although detectives went on to discover that he had been brutally dismembered in a ritual sacrifice – perhaps to win a business deal or secure good luck – the murderer was never confirmed and the case never closed.

Odubanjo’s book takes Adam as his starting point and the name itself becomes a promise, a provocation, a vehicle for his ideas. Adam is old and new and black, and Odubanjo has produced a powerful and calculatedly distorted version of Genesis, mixed in with Yoruba culture. He describes an Eden too compromised to allow the familiar story root room. His creation myth lurches forward as he proves here, and elsewhere, that he is a master at allowing anguish and comedy to share the same space. In the newly created landscape, Odubanjo folds in an underground map (he was born and raised in east London):

… give man sea and sky and trees
and zones one to six on the oyster so man can see it
now man said rah swear down
man said show me

It is that final imperative – “show me” – that feels especially dangerous; you sense in it a threshold, the likelihood of disaster about to be exhibited, a world gone awry. That apprehension of danger is a defining characteristic in this poetry.

Water has exceptional presence here and the uninterruptedly lower-case writing feels almost tidal. Although it is equally true that in poems such as Breaking there is a deliberate fragmentation, as if language itself could not escape assault. Odubanjo warns that people overlook water at their peril. In Rewilding they convince themselves water does not exist. But they should heed Odubanjo’s opening line:

it was the rainy season so it rained

I love the teasing obviousness of this – it makes you settle instantly, knowing you are in the hands of a born storyteller. It is a collection filled with unexpected leaps of imagination, such as the strange and affecting poem Bronze Adam of Benin, in which Odubanjo pictures the dead boy’s father creating a bronze bust in his memory. I enjoyed, too, the serious yet entertaining Against Resting in Peace, a wry reeling off of the futility of being asked to do the right thing (from deleting social media to supporting independent bookshops) when good behaviour guarantees nothing and death turns out to be the destination.

But it is the long poem You: The Many Adams of Adam that is the most ambitious, a poem of collective loss. The entire book is in part about what it is to be a missing person – and it seems an unprocessable tragedy to learn that Odubanjo himself at the end of his life went missing and was discovered to have accidentally drowned in a lake. The Gboyega Odubanjo Foundation has been set up to support low-income black writers and honour him.

Adam by Gboyega Odubanjo is published by Faber (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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Breaking

looks like it’ll be a rainy week ahead thank you now the
body
of an unidentified boy aged between four and seven
was in the river for up to ten days before a passer by
noticed african boy’s stomach included extracts
of calabar bean and flecks of gold expert at kew gardens
says headless limbless boy likely to be Nigerian
growing number have spread throughout the world coming
up
goat arrested for armed robbery prime minister’s response
breaking
male torso boy five or six said to be somebody’s
son boy assigned most appropriate acceptable name
after long deliberation thought to have been in river ten
days
appeal made to family of girls’ shorts boy’s body
walking man who spotted adam to be offered counselling
suspicious thames river boy behaviour should be reported
to authorities in other news

In 1986, two catastrophic events occurred on either side of the cold war divide that shocked the world. On 28 January, 73 seconds after takeoff, the US space shuttle Challenger broke apart in mid-air, killing all seven astronauts on board and traumatising millions of viewers watching live on TV. Three months later, on 26 April, a meltdown at Chornobyl sent a radioactive cloud across the USSR and Europe. Two workers died immediately and the estimated death toll over time ranges from hundreds to tens of thousands. It’s widely believed to have contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In his 2019 book Midnight in Chernobyl, the British writer Adam Higginbotham reconstructed the latter event in forensic detail, building up to the meltdown and tracking its aftermath with the skill of a great thriller writer. It’s one of the most queasily compelling books I’ve ever read, and the scenes in which ill-equipped workers venture into the stricken reactor in the hope of containing the fallout are permanently seared into my memory.

Now Higginbotham is tackling the former event, and despite the awful spectacle of the Challenger disaster and the media frenzy around it at the time – heightened by the presence on board of the charismatic schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe – it would seem the more difficult of the two incidents to turn into a nonfiction page-turner tense enough to make your palms sweat.

For one thing, the Challenger’s demise – though it punctured Nasa’s reputation for competency under pressure, and rattled the US’s conception of itself as a spacefaring nation – did not have the empire-toppling force of Chornobyl, which also hobbled the cause of nuclear energy. For another, though the key event at Chornobyl unfolded very quickly, the danger persisted long after the meltdown and rippled outwards to affect millions of people. The Challenger disaster, by contrast, was over within seconds, and besides the impact on the astronauts and their families, the main damage in the aftermath was to the reputations of those who pushed for the launch despite being aware of fatal flaws in the technology.

Then there’s the sheer volume of technical detail. Midnight in Chernobyl had its share of heavy-duty analysis of how reactors work, and catastrophically fail, but this pales in comparison with the shuttle programme, which has so many moving parts, each complex in its own way, that a writer as thorough as Higginbotham has to work doubly hard to make it all comprehensible.

It helps that he’s extremely good at explaining the intricacies of the world’s first reusable manned spacecraft – the most complicated machine in history, he calls it, with its alarmingly rickety rocket boosters and its infernal jigsaw of heat-insulating tiles, which covered the surface of the shuttle to prevent it from burning up on re-entry. He’s illuminating, too, on the labyrinthine workings of Nasa, which by the 1980s was underfunded, stiflingly bureaucratic and yet wildly overambitious in its mission to make space flight as routine as air travel.

The experience of reading Challenger is a bit like blasting off from Cape Canaveral. The first stretch can be heavy going, requiring the full thrust of Higginbotham’s prose to propel us through the technical and institutional nitty-gritty while also familiarising us with a wide cast of characters – from the astronauts and the top brass at Nasa over three decades to lowly engineers working for contractors around the country. But then, after a couple of hundred pages, the weight of exposition drops away and we cruise with ominous ease towards the events of 28 January 1986.

That we know exactly what’s in store makes the journey no less nerve-racking, largely because Higginbotham is so adept at bringing characters to life, often within the space of a paragraph. One Nasa honcho is described as “secretive, inscrutable, and machiavellian… the Thomas Cromwell of the Johnson Space Center”. As we spend more time with the Challenger crew members, their individual quirks and passions emerge. Ron McNair, one of Nasa’s first Black astronauts and a talented jazz musician, is determined to broadcast himself playing saxophone live from space. Middle-school teacher McAuliffe, who charms everyone with her gee-whiz enthusiasm, fearlessly swings a supersonic jet into a barrel roll when she’s handed the controls during a training flight.

As the astronauts become more vivid on the page, we watch helplessly as repeated attempts to deal with the shuttle’s key weakness – the rubber seals preventing the release of hot gas within the rocket boosters – fail to resolve the problem. It wasn’t just a technical impasse; outside pressures on the shuttle programme meant that higher-ups at Nasa and its contractors were prepared to ignore the warnings in order to stay on schedule. Higginbotham’s account of an emergency meeting on 27 January about the disabling effect of low temperatures on the seals demonstrates this in shocking detail.

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As in the case of Chornobyl, blame also resides with the politicians who heaped pressure on the programme even as they hacked away at its budgets. The media, which hounded the astronauts before the launch and their grieving families afterwards, also come in for criticism. But this is primarily a story of corporate and institutional malfeasance, and echoes of the 1986 disaster – the corner-cutting and the suppression of safety concerns – can be felt in the crisis currently besetting the plane manufacturer Boeing.

Higginbotham’s latest may lack the feverish radioactive pulse and vast dramatic scope of Midnight in Chernobyl, but once it gets over the initial hurdles it’s still one hell of a ride.

• Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham is published by Viking (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply