Skinjob review Bruce McCabe's thriller crackles and spits, and slips

A clash between the porn industry and the American church is a promising plot, but the characters don't come to life

Bruce McCabe's self-published thriller, Skinjob, took off in Australia last summer. Set in a near-future world where brothels are peopled by perfectly lifelike robotic dolls skinjobs and FBI agents carry handheld lie detectors, it came into the hands of JK Rowling's former agent, Christopher Little, who landed the author a mainstream deal amid much excitement.

McCabe, who has a PhD in computer science, does a fantastic job of establishing the technological aspects of his world. A bomb has exploded in a San Francisco dollhouse (brothel), and our hero, agent Daniel Madsen, must use every resource available to prevent more acts of terrorism. Not only is he armed with a portable lie detector, which uses "simultaneous analysis of voice, stress, eye movement, pulse, pheromones, skin flush and breathing" to take "polygraphy to unprecedented levels of accuracy", but surveillance is close to absolute. CCTV is everywhere, and monitored by the police, who can sift through huge amounts of data to track suspects using facial recognition software.

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