SOURCE: “Crime or Banishment,” in The Spectator, September 21, 1996, pp. 51–2.

In the following review, Barrow praises Cocaine Nights as “a wonderfully readable and self-confident book.”

This is the first book I have read by this prolific and popular author. I am therefore unable to say if this is ‘vintage’ Ballard or a dazzling new departure for him, or indeed just how it fits into the massive and star-spangled Ballard oeuvre. I can only say that it is a wonderfully readable and self-confident book, soothingly written yet brimming over with frightening ideas.

Cocaine Nights is set on the Costa del Sol and to some extent takes the lid off the ‘retirement complexes wedged into that overheated strip of land. A well-known English travel writer arrives in the area to try and help his younger brother, who has mysteriously claimed responsibility for the murder of several people in a housefire, though...