Sheathed in silver and sporting a seductive sobriquet, Jim Ballard’s latest novel is as alluringly tricked out as any lame starlet from the Riviera it describes: a companion piece to 1996’s Cocaine Nights, it once again explores this startlingly talented author’s fascination with the way crime and recreation may interact with the technological temptations of the new millennium. So chilling was it in places that, as I read it last month on a yacht in the Med, I had to resort to cashmere to stop myself shivering in the sun.

Paul Sinclair is a magazine publisher who lost his pilot’s licence in a prang, but whilst in hospital fell for a renegade young doctor, Jane, now his wife. She is driving them in his Jag down to the Cote d’Azur, where she has accepted a paediatrician’s post at a high-