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.