Timesplash

I was hooked before I even got the book, the description alone appealed enormously. And I was about as undisappointed as it's possible to be, because this thrill ride of a book kept me going like the sugar rush from a kilo of chocolate on an empty stomach.

First, these debut novels, especially those published small time on Kindle are often full of errors (spelling, grammar, continuity, the works). This is far from; Storrs is practically impeccable (Jay was called Jake once in chapter 24) but that's pretty much the only thing to set my proofing nose atwitch.

What stood out, then? The international quality of the work comes to mind, not just in the official team at the TCU but in the Splashers as a group. There's a great deal of localization: Brussels, Berlin, London - but there's also an extraordinarily wide net of characters represented. Where the locale-specifics were employed, they were employed well, right down to the Geordie's manner of speech, that of the London cabbie, and Bauchet's diction, when he gets riled: an author who can manage to give you a sense that the tech he's talking about impacts the whole world so well, yet focuses so accurately and carefully on specifics at the same time scores major points with me.

The structure of the work also appealed; each part felt right in terms of length and scope: they built on each other, adding to what had gone before whilst helping to show the passage of time and progress of the characters lives and the underlying technology. We weren't spoon-fed detail, but there was enough given so that you could easily follow - a balancing act often flubbed but executed here with magnificent aplomb.

There were little bits throughout that really caught my eye, too. The intense and terrifying end of chapter 3. Bauchet's authoritarian outburst in chapter 8. Jay's great discovery in chapter 9. Then there's Sniper's epic outpouring in chapter 15 which really starts to show his grip on reality is well and truly crumbling.

And then, as we move into the final act, which I suppose is really encapsulated in chapters 22 through 26, the action really kicks into high gear. The race is on, the splash is coming, the mole shows his fangs and it's all or nothing for our heroes in a great swelling bulging warped London of the past.

And, as if the tension and drama and action and excellently written prose isn't enough, as if the comic banter between the leads wasn't quite injecting the right note to keep a serious situation easily readable, as if the picturesque descriptions, imagery and dialog of the era, so apart from the "now" of the work wasn't captivating enough: there's the target. the pièce de résistance, in fact, because the viewpoint of the whole thing switches to the target's perspective, just for those 19, 20 paragraphs or so - that really works, you know? Hell of a weird shift, sounds bonkers, but it fits and more than that it really fits, slots into place, gives the scene a surreal yet painfully vivid reality. A sharpness, yet an innocence, it makes the entire denouement work in a brilliantly satisfying way that left me dry-mouthed with the sheer pace and bravura of it all.

Were I to tender one literary criticism, it's that the last chapter should've been an epilogue. I can't quantify why I think that, it was just my feeling at the time.

This book only cost me £3.29. The eBook was DRM Free from the Kindle store, print is also available from Amazon and an audiobook is similarly priced, both at Audible and an indi publisher without any DRM and in the format of your choosing. I enjoyed every chapter, every page, every sentence. You've got no excuse not to pick it up; no "I can't read it on my device" or "it's not available in audio" or "I can't Braille it". The only thing it'll cost you to read is a few bucks, the price of a relatively good sandwich and a cup of coffee. My advice? Make a pot, sit back with the book however you read it, paper, audio, synthetic, Braille. Get into it, let yourself go and allow the world to unfold in your head. You won't be sorry. If this book isn't in my top 5 reads of 2012, my top 3 even, then I've died and someone else is compiling the list.