Complicity

A distinguished judge who once extended leniency to a convicted rapist is himself brutally raped. A pornographer who specializes in snuff films is given a paralyzing injection while a video camera captures it on tape. A wealthy businessman whose negligence caused a fatal explosion is blown up in his own home. This series of savage, "punishment-fits-the-crime" assaults carried out by a self-styled avenger seems to implicate Cameron Colley, a latter-day Gonzo journalist who tries to put as much cheerful subversion into his dispatches for an Edinburgh-based newspaper as he can get away with. Detained by the police as a suspect, Cameron protests that he's being set up, but he cannot hide a certain complicit admiration for the avenger's violent justice. And Cameron knows the only way to get the cops off his back is to lead them to the vigilante himself - a good plan until it becomes clear that the culprit is uncomfortably close to home.

Iain Banks came to widespread and controversial public notice with the publication of his first novel, The Wasp Factory, recently selected in a British poll as one of the top one hundred novels of the century. He has since gained enormous popular and critical acclaim with his other works of fiction