In a shantytown beneath a stretch of causeway on the Florida coast lives the Kid. Like all of the town's inhabitants, the Kid is limited in his choice of abode by the monitoring device worn around his ankle. For this is a community of sexual offenders, ghettoised by a law forbidding them to live within 2,500 metres of anywhere children may gather. Into this milieu comes the Professor: a sociologist who may have his own dark motives for wanting to uncover details of the Kid's crime. Given the ubiquity of the internet and concerns as to the effects that repeated exposure to pornographic material may have on the sexual development of the young, this is a novel extremely pertinent to our times. Unfortunately, it is also poorly plotted, with a baggy, unfocused narrative, and its dramatic tension is severely undermined by a blurb that gives away far too much of the plot. But it is also admirably non-judgmental in its sympathetic portrayal of the Kid, and Banks writes movingly on the loneliness of addiction.