Sensitive New Age Spy is about as Aussie as a spy book can get complete with an irreverence measured by laconic humour that is evident from the opening page. Heck, McGeachin even manages to stick a Hills Hoist on Fort Denison before the first page is over. Sydney's well-known landmarks are used to great effect and then, to make sure there's no doubt about where you are, a constant flow of Australian slang peppers the dialogue.

It's not every day that you see a super tanker tied up to Fort Denison in the middle of Sydney Harbour and its presence in the early hours of the Australia Day public holiday has all sorts of security organizations with assorted acronyms scrambling. Basically, what the ship amounts to is a potential floating bomb that could take out half of Sydney's CBD should it go off and the armed men prowling around the ship's deck with anti-aircraft weapons suggest they mean business. For Alby, earning the title of "man in charge" at the scene is just the start of a very stressful day.

Before the week is out Alby will have been shot at, been duped, been seduced, been demoted, been flashed by a beautiful Christian, been impressed by his 85 year old next door neighbour and been to Tasmania.

Quite frankly, this is the way all spy novels should be written mixing the serious stuff with plenty of irreverent humour, fronted by a guy who wins some, loses lots but comes across as a highly competent larrikin. When I say irreverent, this is the kind of stuff I'm talking about:

'Canberra' is apparently an Aboriginal word meaning a place where one's tax dollars are pissed away. A self-governing territory and the seat of our federal government, it has also the country's most liberal liquor laws, a thriving blackmarket trade in sky rockets and double bungers, and is home to the nation's mail-order dirty-video business. All in all, a combination to make a bloke's chest swell with patriotic pride.

Not to mention this little gem of an exchange between Alby and the gorgeous lesbian journalist Gudrun Arkell:

I nodded. 'Fancy a moonlit walk through the grapevines with your old Uncle Alby?' 'I've had some seriously creepy offers in my life, Alby, but that one really takes the cake.' 'Bloody bike dyke,' I said. 'Career public servant,' Gudrun retorted. She always was better that me when it came to name-calling.

Amongst a lot of lively banter and some full-blown secret agent-type life threatening moments there is a theft from the off, a major international incident in the offing, there's even a little bit of steamy sex to get off on, but there's plenty of humour and entertainment from go to whoa.

There is an unmistakable Australian-ness to the story, from the slang terms that makes up much of the dialogue to the laid back nature of some of the characters, even when faced with adversity. You might even say that the role of the politicians is unmistakably Australian, as is the fact that they are treated with complete disdain.

Humour plays a major part in the story largely because it is a big part of the make-up of Alby's character. But hiding quietly behind the lighter tone is a slightly more serious message waiting unobtrusively to be grasped. It's an environmental reminder of the delicate balance of nature and our part in it, and similar to Carl Hiaasen's more offbeat comic thrillers, McGeachin makes his point well.

For a high stakes battle of wits that begins at a desperate pace before growing even more furious, Sensitive New Age Spy is completely entertaining and Alby Murdoch has become even more established as an all-Australian hero.