Chad Taylor: Electric

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Set in the Auckland of the electricity failures of 1998, Chad Taylor's slender, splendid thriller shocks and crackles.

It's a great idea for a thriller: a city whose infrastructure is crumbling; a burned-out, drug-loving protagonist who works on retrieving burned-out hard drives.

Within the city - identifiably Auckland but it could be any large city - and within the hard drives live the murky secrets everyone would rather keep hidden. Taylor's fictional city is edgy and shadowy.

Sam Usher, the data-retrieval specialist, stumbles into a twilight world where drug dreams and reality begin to blur. What is reality and how can science - and/or drugs - help make us make sense of it?

"The point of science is to describe the world," says Jules the mathematician, "All these different theories fighting it out. How the world began. What light's made of. And all we can do is wait to see which one is right: to find out who's dreaming and who's awake."

Accomplished, spare, dark and drug fuelled - this fourth novel of Taylor's should be the one which really cracks the international market.

Jonathan Cape

$34.95