Brooklyn Three. "No matter how it comes out in the wash, the wrong guy gets screwed."

The third in the Brooklyn trilogy finds today the day a black kid is buried for straying into the wrong neighbourhood. The day a white aide to inflammatory black Mayoral candidate Dillard is shot dead. The day two fashion driven big-time celebs are kidnapped by a Semtex-smeared psychopath with an impressive arsenal and a serious attitude problem.

Thomas Boyle takes the fairly unusual step here of unfolding his entire canvass of events in the space of a day, giving the novel a pace and drive that suits his material. Dillard's son is slipped a video cassette on the street that appears to threaten his father's campaign through a mixture of images cut from porn movies, found footage, flag burning and a selection of sixties tunes, and head of the Violent Task Force, Detective Inspector Francis DeSales, becomes drawn into events, even if he's never entirely sure how events connect. Ben Asterisky is a former radical college lecturer who becomes convinced that somehow someone on an old course of his is responsible for everything crazy going down this particular day and is determined to prove his self-worth through discovering the culprit.

Given his time-frame, Boyle does tend to make certain connections through one too many convenient coincidences, which his continual undercutting with a wry sense of humour helps to smooth other when things get a little too tenuous to stomach. The book is at its best once all Boyle's infrastructure is in place, once the linkage is made between the cops, DeSales' TV reporter girlfriend, the lecturer's quest, the power-hungry Dillard, and particularly the tasty lunatic that powers the whole thing. The latter third thus becomes an exaggerated chase between all the principles through the ethnic melting pot that is Brooklyn toward the final confrontation.

Particularly well handled is the feel for the desperate futility of those holding to the dreams and ideals of the sixties, especially towards the climax where the would-be black, heavily-tooled media-obsessed madman holds forth in a long, increasingly hysterical diatribe - "How many know that Jim Morrison was really a Native American... Watch your TV listings for the story that tells the truth about Jim Morrison the Indian chief."

Brooklyn Three is a steam-roller of a novel best digested at speed to savour the lunatic narrative drive and the provocative writing that in retrospect probably says more about big city life in America right now than the reader initially appreciates in the rush, eventually conspiring as Boyle does to draw the main cast together in a depressed neighbourhood at night to witness the exquisitely explosive implosion of sixties radicalism with nineties firepower. Light my fire, indeed.