Cameron Colley is a fully-paid-up left-wing Gonzo-journalist (praying to the great god Hunter, no less) with an eye to the main chance that evidences itself as a slowly unfolding conspiracy dictated over the phone by the enigmatic Mr Archer. A series of mysterious deaths from the recent past present themselves as the heart of a black web with tendrils that stretch far and wide, but while he busies himself, the police are far more concerned with a string of violent murders of their own - a Tory MP is bled to death; an ageing judge with a rape-lenient reputation is buggered with a dildo; a kiddie-porn dealer is made the subject of his very own special video - and they are not altogether convinced that a certain high-speed journalist is as ignorant of events as he protests.

There is very little subtlety in this new novel from Banks. His last, the massive The Crow Road, had its fair share of unpleasantness, but on the whole was a (relatively) wholesome Scottish family saga, much detached from his sensationalist debut in the mid-80s with The Wasp Factory. This new book is a self-confessed deliberate return to the murky waters of that earlier book, albeit with an even greater sense of its own absurdities. The atrocities rationed out here are unsparing in their detail and their bold complicity of the reader in the crimes: Banks' political sympathies are not masked. This is an assassin with a purpose, a man on a mission, ensuring that the arms dealers, the pornographers and their ilk will pay for their wrongdoing. And while not questioning his logic, the reader could be forgiven for questioning the author's methods.

Complicity is, no matter how grotesque, a comic novel. Most of the characters are pretty unlikeable, from executive burn-out Andy in his rambling mansion, to the high-flying couple, with the female half of which Cameron conducts his graphically detailed sex-life. And the protagonist himself is far from sympathetic, being consistently arrogant, abusive, and opinionated to the extent that when the law begins to take an active interest it is hard for the reader to really share in the self-pity and horror he evidently feels as the innocent accused. As a consequence, it is difficult to get sufficiently involved with the mystery thread itself for the revelation of the killer's identity (and it comes as little surprise) to carry much weight.

Too often of late Banks seems unable to do justice to his ideas, the intelligence and sophisticated plotting of books like Walking On Glass or the aforementioned The Wasp Factory giving way to a breakneck jokiness that although entertaining enough in itself comes off as lightweight and lazy from the man capable of writing books as driven and purposeful as The Bridge or The Player Of Games. Approach with caution.