The second, so far, of the Ghost Finders series by Simon R. Green. As pointed out in the LJ comments on the previous post about Green’s books, he’s just about finished one of his other urban fantasies (set in the same world) the Nightside books with the hardback publication of The Bride Wore Black Leather recently. This second Ghost Finders book follows the format of the first, pretty much. Now that I think about it, it’s the same pattern he used for most of the Nightside books. A quick 50 pages of an introductory short adventure (to get new to the series people into the ideas, I suspect) and then the rest of the book covering the main adventure (approx 200 pages) which takes place over the course of a few hours. Green’s inventiveness doesn’t desert him and in the Moorcockian style I mentioned before he races the plot along pretty smartly throwing in lots of creepy, short-lived monsters for our protagonists to deal with. This isn’t just a repeat of the first book, though. That one was very much in the vein of William Hope Hodgson’s original Carnacki sequence. This one is more akin to the mix of SF and fantasy that makes the Nightside and Secret Histories books successful formulae. Yes, there is quite a formulaic approach to these stories, but then they’re pure pulp escapism, however drawing on over a century of the literature of the fantastic all put together with Green’s wonderfuly macabre sense of black humour. There’s also the deft setup of an ongoing storyline for these books in this one, just as an extra element to keep people coming back. He clears up that this is definitely the same world as the Secret Histories with a clear mention of the Droods and a mention of the Knights of London, who seem to be fixed up for a clear role in the next to last Nightside book A Hard Day’s Knight, which is what I’m now reading.