Sex, drugs, rock'n'roll? Darn tootin'

Popular Fiction: It's the late 1970s and 21-year-old Maggie Lennon has arrived in Florida with her two equally green - in the wildly inexperienced as opposed to wildly republican sense - Belfast friends.

After a summer of waitressing, her mates have scurried back to Northern Ireland, while she lands a job as a rock'n'roll DJ mostly thanks to the fact that her new boss, the permanently coked-up Zollie, presumes her surname means she is a cousin of John Lennon.

Annie McCartney's hilarious second novel is stuffed with sex 'n' drugs 'n' all the rest and it rattles along like a good rock tune should. When Maggie moves from Florida to Chattanooga, Tennessee, her disc-spinning career starts to soar and so does her love life but in the land of "ya'll" and "ma'am" and "why, ah declare", everything is not as it seems.

Things with stinking rich and gorgeous southerner Nate start to go pear-shaped and Zollie's generosity with illegal substances becomes an occupational hazard for our sporadically homesick heroine.

McCartney's dialogue sparkles and is authentic whether the characters are Tennessee's finest or Belfast natives. "I don't know what in God's name you're doing out there playing records anyway, when you could be building up your teaching pension," Maggie's dad muses down one long-distance line.

Her characters are both thoroughly believable and deliciously dysfunctional - creepy twins Vance and Chance, described as looking like "famine and the cause of it", are a particular scream - while the author's passion for rock shines through every page. The plentiful musical references enhance an already raucous atmosphere.

It's not too much of a stretch to presume that at least some of the material here is semi-autobiographical. Belfast-born Annie McCartney also enjoys a Beatle-esque surname which no doubt caused similar confusion when she lived in Tennessee for five years in the 1970s working as a rock'n'roll DJ.

She was also once fired from a job as a cocktail waitress because she "decked a fat redneck who felt my bum", which is exactly the kind of thing Maggie Lennon might do.

Y'all read this book now, y'hear?

Your Cheatin' Heart by Annie McCartney, Time Warner, 277pp. £10.99

Róisín Ingle is an Irish Times journalist