I adored Charlie Huston’s Joe Pitt series. An unaffiliated vampire living in New York dealing (very badly at times) with the many clans. The great thing about the Joe Pitt books were that they were short, written with a hard, steely edge, made vampirism all dirty and nasty and, for a series of urban fantasy novels, had a beginning middle and end. I know. I couldn’t believe it either.

Skinner is a standalone novel. And the first non Joe Pitt book I’ve read (although I do own his other standalones and the Henry Thompson trilogy). I expected to love it and so was horribly surprised to discover that if I wasn’t already a fan of Huston’s work I might have stopped reading Skinner about halfway through.

Most books, at least the good ones, have a rhythm. For whatever reason I struggled to find the rhythm of Skinner. Part of the blame is psychological, with all the business going on at home (none of it bad) I simply haven’t been in the right frame of mind for a thriller like Skinner. And to be fair, this isn’t necessarily a book that you’re meant to zip through in a day. On the surface the novel takes a look at cyber-terrorism, but when you scratch a bit deeper it becomes an exploration of how Western Civilisation intends to deal with the third world – that is eschew responsibility and let them all kill each other or starve to death (also knows as contraction). So weighty stuff. There’s also a cat and mouse complexity to the novel that requires genuine engagement.

But I also blame the book, in particular the main characters – Jae and Skinner – who are had to get to know. That’s done on purpose. Skinner – as his name suggests – lived his first twelve years in a Skinner box (an experiment performed by his autistic parents) and so is pretty screwed psychologically. His job is to protect important people and kill anyone who threatens their life. He also has a maxim – if you kill my asset I will kill anyone who had anything to do with my assets death. In other words not someone you want to fuck with. It’s not the fact that he’s a killer that I had a problem with though. It was the fact that Skinner is so divorced of his emotions. Absolutely deliberate on the part of Huston – but not easy to read.

Jae, on the other hand is an obsessive compulsive and so caught up in the detail that I felt myself skimming over the bits where she’s trying to put all the pieces of her life, her relationship with Skinner and the ongoing plot together. This happens often and I found myself falling out of the story when it did.

That said, about 100 pages before the end I did find the book’s rhythm and zipped through the final section. There’s a currency to the novel – it refers to a number of natural disasters and terrorist attacks, including the Tsarnaev brothers bombing of the Boston Marathon – that compels you to question whether it is to late to deal with the current problems facing the world. Ontop of that, the escalating tension, the fact that I started to genuinely emphasise with Skinner and Jae and some terrific writing (because at the end of the day Huston knows how to write a great sentence) made this an ultimately worthwhile read.

Personally, though, if you haven’t read Huston before start with the Joe Pitt books.