Books – From Hell, With Love

I’m skipping around in my reading order again here. I was slow writing the entry on the next book I read (Simon R. Green’s A Hard Day’s Knight) and finished the subsequent one before writing up that entry. Although not in the same series, they are set within the same world and From Hell was written first and there are a few linkages that make sense to write this one up first.

So, this is the fourth book in the Secret Histories series, which as mentioned in the posts on the Ghost Finders Books, was the second sequence Simon R. Green started upset in the same world as the Nightside. The Secret Histories was originally planned as a trilogy but was popular enough that the publisher and the author decided to keep going. Despite the beginning of the Nightside books claiming, more or less, that magic doesn’t work in the “real world” outside the Nightside, or at least that gifts from within it such as John Taylor’s “find it” gift don’t work there, this book throws out that premise and has the “real world” be the usual covert urban fantasy world with all sorts of weird crap happening that most people are unaware of, ignore, explain away or have the Men in Black cover up.

While it starts with a quick introduction to the setup (a family with superpowerful armour provided by an nth-dimensional being protect the world from evilness) I suspect this series has a bit too much background intewoven into the plot for it to truly make sense without reading the first three.

This series differs in a few ways from the other two urban fantasy series in the same universe in that the books are longer and the plots more involved. The nature of the organisation involved tends toward large villain-driven plotlines on a grand earth-shattering scale. Much as the name suggests, this series is heavily based on the idea of a supernatural James Bond (later Connery, early Moore era). Like the Hawk and Fisher and Nightside books, it features a couple with a seriously warped view of the world who are nevertheless deeply in love with each other, even if they sometimes show it in really strange ways.

This is a decent addition to the series, though I think I prefer the Nightside and Ghost Finders sequences in this universe.

Like the second Ghost Finders book, there’s a significant mention of the London Knights in this one, and even mention of Jerusalem Stark, the apostate London Knight. He was clearly setting these guys up for A Hard Day’s Knight, where they both appear as major characters, at least for readers following all the inter-linjked series.

Current Mood:  blah

Current Music: Bladerunner Soundtrack

Originally published at blog.a-cubed.info

Books – A Hard Day’s Knight

This is apparently the next-to-last Nightside book (the last being “The Bride Wore Black Leather”). As usual it features John Taylor saving the world. Well, he doesn’t always save the world. Once or twice he just saves a few people.  The plot for this one was set up in the last book, which combined John being asked to take over as the voice of the authorities in the Nightside, and dealing with the Fae (elves). The elves here, as with much of the setup for this world, are actually shared with his earlier one-off book Shadow’s Fall. That one ended up with a complete world-changing scenario, however, so it’s either a parallel universe to this one, or set in the future.

This tale begins with John Taylor returning to London proper and, as I mention in my review of the Secret Histories book From Hell, With Love, it slightly retcons the idea that John can use his gift in London Proper, but didn’t. It’s quite clear in the first book, Something from the Nightside, that John’s talent is supposed to not work outside the Nightside originally. Having decided that magic does actually work in the “real world” after all, not least so he could do the Secret Histories and Ghost Finders books in the same universe as the Nightside, he does a quick retcon to claim that John just had god reason not to use his gift in the real world.

This begins to tie up some of the loose-ish ends left over from earlier books in the Nightside and pays off a setup in Ghost of a Smile and From Hell, With Love, bringing in the London Knights (and their apostate Jerusalem Stark, as major players in this story having given them enough nods in the other two books to be a large Chekov’s gun sitting on the mantlepiece.

This is the usual Nightside romp. Lots of violence, some sneakiness, some downrights nastiness (on all sides) wth the good guys winning out as usual, but at something of a price.

John Taylor has been gradually getting more powerful through this series and he’s getting into serious demi-god-like territory here. I think this might be behind the wrapping up of the series. Once a character gets too close to god-hood it’s tough to give them an interesting opponent other than the devil and that can only be done so many times (and Green did it here in Hell to Pay).

As I mentioned in the review of Ghost of a Smile, Green mines his own and other people’s background with glee and verve. In this one, we get a sideways mention that his earlier Hawk and Fisher characters are sitting in Strangefellows. This is oblique, rather like his mentions of character for which he doesn’t have the rigts, like the Travelling Doctor, rather than explicit, such as his use of the elves as he introduced them in Shadow’s Fall.

Current Mood:  blah

Current Music: Star Trek (2009) Soundtrack

Originally published at blog.a-cubed.info