One hesitates to suggest an author is writing down to a notional audience, but when we know it as Mike Philips (for it is pseudonymously he) behind this hard, slightly sleazy, sometimes silly little novel, what other conclusions remain to be drawn?

This is a book about a mixed-race gang reasoning, turned-over as they are by life, the right is earned to turn-over a London bookies. It has violent gangster triplets, men launched from tower-block windows, firearms, hostage-taking, a lesbian orgy, single mothers, and an excess (the right collective noun?) of used tampons. Something, as they say, for all the family.

Fast Road to Nowhere is prime pulp, to be sure, but one that's neither as ferocious nor as brutal as it initially threatens. The air of menace is palpable, but the resultant body count exceptionally low. The amount - and gusto - of the sex, mind, borders on parodic: "...he could master a woman like this with his dick, and make her cry out and groan and ask for more." Richard Allen, anyone?

Philips, as befits a Writer in Residence on London's South Bank, can do better and he knows it - but then that's scarcely the point. As Joe Canzius he's having fun, playing fast and loose with structure, leaping viewpoint from character to character. All his worst impulses are spiked out on the page, albeit without the pretensions of BritLit. Stylistically, though, he cannot help but demonstrate his prowess, and here the book is at its most interesting; its tone uneasy, morality all over the place, and the whole shebang liberally sugared with black humour.

Fast Road to Nowhere ain't art, doesn't purport to be art. Which doesn't absolve the sloppiness inherent in the last 50 or so pages, nor some of the less salubrious dialogue, but taken on its own terms, makes for a colourful if undemanding few hours. ** 1/2