Night Watch
Discworld
By Terry Pratchett

     Terry Pratchett does it again; this is his twenty-ninth (but don't quote me on that) novel about Discworld, and the series is as fresh as ever. Sam Vimes is a duke now and lives in a mansion, has people trying to assassinate him, and his wife Sybil is having their first child. But there is a special day to commemorate and a wreath to lay, together with certain members of the Watch who were there, and know the significance of bunches of lilacs and a hard-boiled egg. Before much can happen, lightening strikes in the wrong place and Sam ends up back in the past - together with a particularly nasty criminal he was chasing. But by being in his own past and meeting his young self, surely he will change history, and all the things that make his present life worth living will cease to exist…

     Pratchett is not, in my opinion, a consistently good writer, but this is definitely one of his better efforts containing a whole story with a spring in its step (i.e. not sagging in the middle like an old bed), most of his popular characters and plenty of laugh-out-loud humor. I'm never quite sure what I enjoy the most about Pratchett at his best, but I think maybe it is his talent for conveying a vast amount in a few telling words; his own perspective on that perennial tragic-comedy known as the human condition. We get to learn about some key figures thirty years in the past, including Mad Lord Snapcase, Lord Downey and even the youth of the Patrician himself. It's satire all the way through on more subjects than I can mention, but this is also a story with a large heart and some edge-of-the-seat action. In fact, you've got the lot in here and in my opinion this is one of Pratchett's best novels. Highly recommended.