John Taylor hasn’t been home for about 5 years. Too many people were trying to kill him in the Nightside, a segment of London that is magically separated from normal time. It is always 3am. It has ghosts and monsters and even a few weirdos. "Not everything that looks like a car is, and it is probably hungry." The rich lady has lost her daughter; and lo and behold, it is rumored that she may be found in the Nightside. John Taylor has a special talent for finding things, a soft spot for legs that won’t quit, lost children and really big retainers, so into the shadow he slides with Joanna in tow.

I loved this story because of the humor and pacing; much of it drawn from the ever-moving traffic and the colorful characterizations of Betty, Lucy, Alex, Shotgun Suzie and Razor Eddie. The twist at the climax comes with a line as shocking as "No Luke, I am your father", turning the case sideways and revealing the evil behind the door.

Agents of Light and Darkness
I really do believe that there are forces in the universe more powerful that the frail husk of humankind. Maybe that is why I have never liked the kind of story that puts people on the playing field of mythic conflict. I want the good guys to be good, and the bad guys to be bad. I don’t care if it’s hard to tell them apart, as long as they can all be sorted out in the end. So when the Angels of Light and Darkness come to Nightside to find the Unholy Grail (the cup Judas Iscariot drank from at the Last Supper) I rolled my eyes at the divine stomping that took place in the streets. Who was it? Angels. Which side? It doesn’t matter. Stay out of the way.

I kept plugging along because I promised to do so and I am really glad I did.

After all of the hiding, burning, shooting, evisceration, and bleeding, the conflict is resolved, with help from an unexpected quarter, in a solution so elegant that it makes me question whether this book should be classified as "Fantasy" or "Inspirational". The lesson in Agents of Light and Darkness is visceral and I will remember the telling of it always. In the long run, angels don’t matter at all.

Nightingale's Lament
Take all of my emotion and energy pumped from the previous novel, invert it, and send it sliding all the way down to the opposite end of the scale. Maybe it was because I was so impressed with the previous two books that I found myself looking for a lesson in Nightingale’s Lament.

The local Nightside power plant, run by Prometheus, Inc., is being haunted. John is hired to find out what is going on. Unfortunately solving the case also involves the destruction of the power plant and blackouts across the grid, including the local cryogenic preservation depository. John hooks up with his friend Dead Boy to stop the possessed corpses and pick up a key bit of information to solve his big case. Hired by a frightened father who wants John to contact his daughter, Rossignol, with a message to call home, John must seek out every man’s dream-turned-nightmare. Ross is a Nightside chanteuse with managers who won’t let anybody near her. There are rumors that her singing is so sad that she can drive a person to suicide. Daddy just wants to know she is really okay.

The purpose of this book seems to be the continuation of the overall storyline, aka a day in the life of John Taylor: rescue an imprisoned soul or three, exorcise a primal demon, avoid the Harrowing, pick up an undead sidekick who is a walking bodily dysfunction, threaten the bad guys who are scared of your mom, duck Walker, imprison the master criminals and go to the netherworld to save the girl. How weird can it get, and who else wants John Taylor dead?

The best part about this compilation volume is that there are four more Nightside books to be read! I want to know who John Taylor’s mother is, what she is planning and why Walker is such a jerk. Answers to these questions and more can only be found in the Nightside.