Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon.

Maxine Tarnow is a decertified fraud investigator (think an accountant-cop), a doting mother of two, with a sort-of ex-husband still hanging around the fringes of a life that is more richly and lovingly detailed than anything Pynchon has produced before. It helps that she haunts the same streets the writer has walked for the past few decades - New York itself is a character here, and its denizens are conjured with a veracity bordering on the documentary.

Bleeding Edge will be known as Pynchon's ''September 11 novel'', though he saves his most direct authorial intrusions to savage those who quickly turned the atrocity into a tool for manipulating public opinion. He's more interested in the faces at street level, and the power structures into which they find themselves inevitably caught up. One, of course, is the emergent internet, and its transformation from an instrument of possibility to a late capitalist system of surveillance and control, wearing the Dayglo garments of shopping and entertainment.

Our heroine's work draws her into the suspicious rackets of a series of venture capitalists and dotcom billionaires, government enforcers and Russian mafia, hackers and dealers and spooks. Things even leap into the supernatural - a rumoured army of brainwashed, time-travelling kids, a Trinidadian bike courier blessed with angelic powers.

But while all this seems typically Pynchonian, it's delivered in a package that's one part rom-com, one part action-thriller. Maxi's banter with besties Heidi and Vyrva are straight from the Sex and the City playbook, while the novel's chase scenes and shoot-outs could have been ripped from Law & Order.