2008-08-14 Behind dirty net curtains a robbery gets planned.

Mike Duff first mugged us with his vivid stream of consciousness stories in the much overlooked Low Life. He's back again with a fantastic drunken caper about a plan to rob a casino.

What starts out as a drunken brag quickly becomes an unavoidable heist which he's forced to be a part of by an uncontrollable psycho. Well, that and having to pay for an expensive divorce.

It's a brilliant, pacy book that robbed me of plenty of time. I couldn't do anything else until I'd finished it. There's not a lot to like about the characters, but you end up caring for them. Just hoping you never meet them.

Featuring a similar sort of scheming to that found on the housing schemes described in the works of authors such as James Kelman, Irvine Welsh and Alan Warner, The Hat check Boy is also written with the dialect presented phonetically, but in Mancunian rather than Scottish.

There seems to be an enormous amount of praise heaped on the above writers - maybe it's time to shower Mike Duff with similar praise. He's used to the rain.