Quickly cornering the market in post-alternative comedy - producer for Reeves and Mortimer; script-man for Harry Enfield - former musician Charles Higson recently stepped in front of the camera for a string of well received appearances on BBC2's Fast Show. He's a busy lad, but somewhere in the midst of it all he finds time to pursue his other career as novelist to the low-life. Following up on 1992's Patricia Highsmith-praised King of the Ants and following year's even-better Happy Now, Full Whack is Higson's first sneak between hardcovers.

Dennis Pike used to be a hard man. A very hard man. Part of a violent London gang in his former years, Pike was the meanest of the mean, hardest of the hard; a man with no compunction or restraint. But ten years on, the 34-year-old is different. Prematurely grey, behind glasses, he's content to pass his days watching films from the safety of his leather settee and plan for his long-awaited exile to Canada and a new life for Dennis Pike.

But one day he's visited by Noel and Chas Bishop, who want him to help rob another former gang member, Patterson, now big in electronics. When he refuses, Chas' pet hacker Herman the German raids Pike's building society and steals his nest egg. And when Chas subsequently goes missing, it's down to Noel and Pike to buddy-up on a chase across country from Bath to Swindon to Wales after brothers and money and answers. Mind you, Terry Nugent and child molester Basil Smallbone also want a word after the former watched Chas' back in gaol and now wants the monies owing.

Reading this book leaves the impression that Higson's bookshelves groan under the weight of Hiaasen, Leonard, Hall and the rest of the American school of crime. Full Whack wants to be what, for want of a better name, we should call the Florida Novel. It's characters - especially Nugent and Smallbone - are lifted straight from the genre, larger than life, viciously comic. But Higson knows this is Britain on the tail-end of the year, that any pretensions to road and buddy movies are hamstrung by endless traffic jams and these people being ever so slightly crap. Thus Herman the German is what passes for exotic in this world; the love interest (if we can call it that) is a single-parent with a Louise Brooks cut; and these villains are as wont to fling shit as pull a blazing automatic. These people don't have automatics and fast cars - leather-clad Welsh hard man Handsome, a wonderful comic creation, is reduced to a sensible Range Rover and shotgun.

Higson is as alert to the conventions of genre in all this as he is the ludicrous potential. It's to his credit that he sets up some obvious suspects for our identification, but thankfully fails to deliver the expected pay-offs. In the dust-jacket blurb it's all too easy to misread "mordant best" as "modest best" and that seems only fitting. Exchanging cocaine and cash for building societies and Ecstasy, a British Florida Novel is always going to be modest. The difference is that Higson knows it: this is his best book so far.