The blurb reads:

"Hisako Onoda, world famous cellist, refuses to fly. And so she travels to Europe as a passenger on a tanker bound through the Panama Canal. By the end of her journey she has ignited one soldier with an oxy-acetylene torch, stabbed another through the chest with the spike of her cello, clobbered a guard with the butt of a rifle and raked terrorists with machine-gun fire before frazzling the survivors in an oil-covered sea".

I can't recommend this one I'm afraid. I've loved some of Iain Banks' books - The Wasp Factory and The Crow Road for example - and, at his best, I think he's dark, funny, engrossing and very clever. But this book is just gratuitously nasty. Typing out that blurb, I wondered if the book's meant to be funny (in the same way as The Wasp Factory) but I just found it repugnant (even more so than Complicity, which I found similarly unpleasant).

Oh well, maybe the next reader will enjoy it more. There's no doubt he's a talented writer, but he always treads a fine line between being darkly funny and being grimly repellent, and I think this books falls on the wrong side of the line.

The cover art is different from that shown here btw.

RELEASE NOTES:

About 17:50

found it in a phone box in Brighton 24-08-05, giving it to my wife as I don't read much, when she has finished it's going to go in a bottle and get thrown off Brighton pier to see if it gets to France