Tom Harvey is walking to meet Lucy, to him the prettiest girl at his school. She was the girl next door but still lives close by in her flat in their home in the sky: Compton House tower block on the impoverished Crow Town high rise estate. A stolen iPhone is thrown from the window of Lucy's flat and shatters Tom's skull, finding a weak spot in his skull and plunging him into a coma. However, rather than the impact killing him something amazing happens, the chip of the iPhone embeds itself into the neural pathways of his brain. He wakes wired into the global networks of mobile phone, internet and television superhighways that invisibly cross the land and he has control of electrical fields. But something terrible has happened to Lucy and he begins to exact a terrible revenge on those who have hurt her.
On one level therefore this is a good adventure story about an ordinary boy who becomes a superhero by freak accident, the stuff of comic book legend. However, Brooks also subtly interweaves into his text concepts of social injustice, the impact of single parenthood on the lives of young boys, gang warfare and violence as power into the fabric of this book, so you come away having learned much about the moral ambiguities of revenge, justice and hate.
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