It's election day in contemporary New Zealand. A young father confronts a teenage burglar. A psychologist's political stand threatens to see him driven from the university community. A staffroom argument flares up - does a playground fight warrant a student's expulsion? A young girl sets about mending her broken heart, a skinhead riot erupts and Richard, the biology lecturer at the heart of this simmering forty-eight hours, must deal with the secret which compels them all, unknowingly, to the same conclusion. In Acid Song, an absorbing and darting novel, a varied cast of characters is linked by chance and circumstance. With a powerful, addictive intensity Bernard Beckett composes a corrosive song of our times.