Mad, bad and wild at heart, the new novel from Barry Gifford (his first to be published here in a while), is dizzying stuff. In it, unemployed mechanic, DelRay Mudo, falls for the obvious charms of Ava Varazo, a smart-cookie Mexican prostitute, and her a scheme to "run a number on a rich pimp I know in Texas."

In the lone-star town of Sinaloa - a place where "nothing good ever happens" - Ava plans to ice Indio Desacato, a drug-running whorehouse owner, and make off with a canvas sack stuffed with a half million dollars. And she does, but, being a strong-willed and independently minded sort of a girl, Ava has also already ear-marked their ill-gotten gains for her own ends - and thems are ones that don't include DelRay Mudo. Still, at least she lets her accomplice live.

As anyone who has ever read Gifford will know, he's not one for the tightly coiled narrative or the adrenalised plot. These are character studies of people on the fringes of society; books with a morality all their own. They derive inspiration from their players, to take flight in whatever wayward direction Gifford chooses, offering long strings of short, intense chapters. At their very best these are almost short stories. There is something of Raymond Carver about a Gifford novel, just as there is so often the taut prose and untamed imagination that tempts magic realism. The Sinaloa Story is as much about reading between the lines as the lines themselves.

All of which goes some way to explaining why the latter half of the book dispenses with Ava and DelRay to trail the young Cobra Box (his characters are always spectacularly blessed) back to her home town of New Orleans to help friend Contessa Sims, a cop accused of murder. Plot is a river in Gifford's book: you either swim with the tide or drown.

Rebel Inc. are also reissuing the entire Sailor and Lulu saga (the classic Wild At Heart novel and its various follow-ups) in a single volume, investing a much over-due faith in a quite remarkable talent. Too many of Gifford's novels remain unpublished in the UK, of which at least one, 1994's hallucinatory Arise And Walk, is a genuine American masterpiece. The Sinaloa Story isn't quite that, but, like Jim Sallis' recent Eye of The Cricket, it provides a thrilling, visceral poetry to stain the dark heart of the best contemporary crime writing.