Tense and spiky, featuring a feral, science-fictionish group of characters dodging murder and mayhem in a West Coast technopolis, A Gift for the Little Master takes off like gangbusters. Delores is a tough, gorgeous cable TV news reporter whose specialty is in-your-face interviews with the victims of drunk drivers and psychopaths. Delores’s night work intersects with a whole group of loner exotics: there’s Eli, a cyborg-like bike messenger who finds himself the target of a relentless, road-raged SUV; Turner, a rogue cop with an arsenal of heavy-metal persuasion devices; and two Nietzsche-quoting, wine-quaffing serial killers, who kick-start the central murder mystery by butchering a sportscaster’s wife in a tacky condo.

The book’s first half is a tour de force – in addition to creating a brilliantly grimy labyrinth of corrupt news organizations, worn-out public services, and soul-mangling housing developments, Gray has stuffed these all-too-familiar crudscapes with the humans that are trapped by them: suicidal yuppies, confused immigrants, and swollen media stars. Gray shares Tom Wolfe’s hatred of the dumbing down of just about everything, and Ross Macdonald’s gift for the telling character cameo (the Sikh paperboy who discovers the first corpse is a gem).

Part cutting-edge zine, part black-humoured thriller, this is stunning stuff. It’s too bad, then, that much of this unruly fun is curtailed in the second portion of the book, where the solution to the murders becomes a tad unconvincing and some of the key characters lose force. But Gray’s got a wild talent – he’s deposited this reviewer down in the fiction-section mosh pit, clamouring for more.