This book is fast paced, very fast paced. If you like your SF in thick wordy weighty tomes a yard and half thick full of detailed descriptive passages detailing every apect of the setting, the technology, even the flora and fauna then this is not for you. If however you like action packed, cyber-punk edged dark SF with a high body count then you should be in for a treat here.

The main character, Calloway, is a gentically and chemically enhanced 'actor', the leading star of Rhinestone Pictures, a film company producing Splat movies (movies where people sign up to be terminals, legally killed on screen, with cash payments being made to their dependants). After a lengthy career Calloway starts to rebel, to leave terminals alive at the end of movies and to attempt escape from the studios complex.

Set against this we have an organisation of hackers and saboteurs competing for maximum damage, a world where ecological damage has been taken to the extreme, various criminal and secret state organisations, and an unbelievably high body count. And all this presented complete with filming instructions (Begin Main Titles, Fade Up, Smash Cut To).

This is where the books main criticism can be made. There is so much going on it can get a little disorienting. Characters come into the story last a couple of chapters and are killed off, just as you get used to them.

The writing style however is slick and very readable, pages just seem to turn of their own volition as the story drags you through chapter by chapter (I completed this in two sittings). There is more than enough here to suggest you should keep an eye out for Paul Collins work.