In the New England town of Quinsigamond - here an even darker, more pox-ridden hell-hole of a place than it was last visit - a priest is sent to his maker earlier than even he hoped, helped along by a benzene baptism and a Zippo lighter. For policewoman Hannah Shaw comes the simple question of local gangs linked to the dead man; for others gathered about the fashionable nightclub Wireless life is a complex whirl of free-airwave philosophy and radio jamming. There is Wallace, the ballroom-champion dwarf with a basement full of broadcast equipment; the militant Hazel, all too willing to take this war off air and onto the streets; Speer, the psychopathic radio investigator; Ronnie, the hot, itinerant phone-in sex therapist; and holding it all together, the glue in these cracks, the enigmatic insurance-man, G.T. Flynn.

As with Box Nine, this novel is driven by a myriad of characters, some more successful than others. Shaw is easier to take than Leonore Thomas in that earlier book, but that may just be down to seeing markedly less of her. And that despite links the author attempts to forge between the two that simply come out forced and unconvincing. Worse, O'Connell's eye for the decay of his city is in no way matched by his ear for the radio broadcasts that fuel the whole.

Ray, WQSG's fascistic shock jock, driven on a diet of Revelations and bigotry, is simplistic, but maybe that is the point with such a creature. Worse, Ronnie's Libido Liveline is cringe-making above and beyond. Again, maybe it really is O'Connell's purpose, but if it is then he is sadly miscalculating. Without this convincing bed-rock it really is scarcely credible that the supposedly subversive "jammers" would bother at all, particularly when all they seem achieve in finally breaking through is the radio equivalent of a psycho-babble "Hello Mum". For a book about the power of radio culture, Wireless is frequently about as thrilling as the shipping forecast.

This book, as before, is penned disconcertingly in the present tense, and although fortunately less distanced than before, the style is still unnecessarily jarring. That and some seriously over-written passages (though nowhere near as flagrant as the whole pages in Box Nine) combine with an arduous length to make it wearing a good 100 pages from the end.

Two books in and we have to start and wonder what is Jack O'Connell's point. His Quinsigamond has potential; a collapsing, gang-ridden, multi-ethnic void that brings to mind William Gibson. Likewise, his concentration on women characters - especially his intense female cops - is refreshing, but all this is shoehorned into a world where detail all too often substitutes for narrative. O'Connell needs invest in a ruthless editor if his Bangkok Park is ever going to have the shelf-life it perhaps deserves.