The Ultimate Rush by
Joe Quirk
pbk out February 99
(No Exit Press)
at £6.99
The story’s narrator, Chet Griffin, is the sole rollerblading courier at a San Francisco delivery service. He is also a convicted hacker. The delivery of a floppy disk may seem routine to you and me, but it soon lands Chet and an assortment of cosily weird allies into conflict with the San Francisco Police Department, the Chinese mafia and what the blurb calls “a worldwide web of high-finance murderers”.
The result is curiously cosy. In a way, the ambience is reminiscent of the TV soap Friends except that Friends does not contain a hacker with cerebral palsy, a lesbian skateboarder, a boa constrictor or such strenuously imaginative sex.
Subtle it’s not, but THE ULTIMATE RUSH is very fast, great fun and equipped with a puff from Howard Marks, Oxford University’s best-known drug dealer. Moreover, the book richly deserves the 1998 Fun Slang Award.
(
Andrew Taylor
- author of the highly acclaimed Roth & Lydmouth Series)
The Ultimate Rush by
Joe Quirk