The title of Cormac McCarthy’s ninth novel is a little misleading. The book’s rugged Texas borderland setting is, in fact, no country for any sort of human being. Old or young, man or woman, Mexican or American — all are equally liable to be crushed by a land so merciless that it would make an Old Testament prophet blanch.

The nail-biting story opens when Llewelyn Moss, a 36-year-old Vietnam veteran, stumbles on the bloody aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong. Among the corpses is a suitcase filled with more than $2m in cash. Moss, a welder who lives in a trailer home with his pretty young wife Carla Jean, decides to take the money. “His whole life was sitting there in front of him. Day after day from dawn till dark until he was dead. All of it cooked down into 40lb of paper in a satchel.”

Moss, however, is hobbled by a flaw that is sure to be punished in McCarthy country — decency. He returns to the massacre site to help out a badly wounded survivor, an act that brings him to the attention of the novel’s two other main characters. The first is Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, an easy-going second-world-war veteran on the cusp of retirement. The other is Anton Chigurh, a relentless blue-eyed killer who prefers to dispatch his victims with a pneumatically powered slaughterhouse cattle gun. The three men are soon engaged in a lengthy danse macabre that leaves a trail of corpses strewn throughout the Texas-Mexico badlands.

Those familiar with McCarthy’s formidable Border Trilogy will recognise the harsh setting and endemic mayhem. What may surprise them is the novel’s unrelenting bleakness, reminiscent of his 1985 masterpiece Blood Meridian. Although the story’s initial trajectory brings to mind the traditional western, where violence serves as a cauldron for a hero’s redemption, no such dynamic is at work here. The blistering desert sun shines equally on the corrupt and the brave.

Should you have the stomach for it, No Country for Old Men is an utterly compelling read.

McCarthy’s celebrated prose is as vibrant as ever, generating action sequences that are lucid and thrilling. He is particularly good at capturing the laconic tenor of south Texan dialogue. When Bell and a deputy discover the bullet-riddled body of a drug dealer, Bell announces that he died of natural causes. “Natural causes?” the deputy asks dubiously. “Natural to the line of work he’s in,” comes Bell’s reply. Moments later, while surveying the slaughter of the shoot-out, the deputy remarks that it sure is a mess. “If it ain’t, it’ll do till a mess gets here,” the world-weary sheriff answers. When Carla Jean tells Llewelyn that he is chasing a “false god” by keeping the treasure, he answers, “Yeah. But it’s real money.”

The book’s deepest strength is its characters. McCarthy takes considerable pains to make them memorable, perhaps because he doesn’t intend to keep many of them around for long. The foolishness Moss displays by pocketing the drug money is mitigated by his tendency to come to the aid of wounded criminals and runaway waifs, and by the love he bears his young wife. No such ambiguity surrounds Chigurh, the most fearsome McCarthy character since Blood Meridian’s Judge Holden. In one riveting scene, Chigurh forces an old shopkeeper to flip a coin to determine whether he will live or die. Like many memorable killers in fiction, he holds to a strict if perverted code of honour, seeing himself as an instrument of the dark fate that moves inexorably through the book. “This is the end,” he explains to one of his soon-to-be-victims. “You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way. You’re asking that I second say the world.”

Standing in direct contrast to him is Bell, whose belief in the value of justice and decency is matched by his certainty that these qualities are fast fading from the world. He is a truly compassionate conservative, a lawman who thinks his job is to protect the citizens of his county against a harrowing modern world and their own worst instincts. He is also aware how marginal a figure he cuts in a society fuelled by narcotics, greed and senseless violence. “The worst of it is knowing that probably the only reason I’m even still alive is that (criminals) have no respect for me.” The good sheriff may hold the moral high ground, but in McCarthy’s world the only advantage this gives him is that he can see how bad things are in the valley below.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN by Cormac McCarthy

Picador £16.99 pp309

Available at the Books First price of £15.99 on 0870 165 8585.

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy