From Publishers Weekly

Novelist O'Neill (Digging the Vein), a recovered heroin addict and lapsed rocker, draws on his experiences for this fast-paced, compulsively readable (if occasionally self-indulgent) portrait of a young would-be rocker junkie. After most of his belongings are repossessed (or sold for drug money) and his wife Susan admits to embezzling thousands of dollars from her company to support their habit, the unnamed narrator and his wife flee Los Angeles for his former home in England. There, he tries frantically to plug back into the London drug and music scenes and struggles to get clean. Fighting violent withdrawal symptoms, living in squalor on London's infamous Clapton Road (aka Murder Mile) and grappling with a sadistic and controlling rehab doctor, O'Neill's antihero paints a grim, bloody picture of compulsive self-destruction. As veteran of half a dozen bands (including the Brian Jonestown Massacre), O'Neill gives himself too much space to voice his professional grievances, and there's a tendency to name-drop. Still, the novel's consistent tone of urgency and desperation creates a gritty world of its own that compels despite its flaws. (Nov.)
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From

At 21, the nameless narrator of Murder Mile, with a broken marriage and a broken career behind him, faces a burgeoning heroin habit and a new marriage to a fellow junkie. Their downward spiral into squalor and desperation, first in L.A. and then in a dangerous neighborhood in London, is rendered in exquisitely precise prose. Once a musician with a promising career, the narrator now has no qualms about pawning his gear, running scams for money, and spending entire days and nights frantically looking for drugs. Collapsed veins and exhausted funds drive the couple to a methadone clinic, where Susan must put on a “crying, begging routine” to get them into a program, and they must follow a strict set of byzantine rules to stay in it. Having found a tenuous stability, he eventually takes a job with a music magazine, forms a new band, and falls in love. As with other titles in the annals of addiction, such as Naked Lunch (1962) and Permanent Midnight (1995), the hell of addiction is made as visceral as the hell of sobriety. --Joanne Wilkinson