I was born in Essex and, after passing my 11+, attended a grammar school in Chelmsford that had Latin on the curriculum from the first year and chemistry from the second. Then we moved north, after my dad took a headship in Yorkshire, so I moved to a different grammar school in Halifax, a school that taught chemistry from the first year and Latin from the second. A second first year of Latin was pretty good for me, as I enjoyed it and it has proved useful over decades with a variety of languages, including English. However, missing the first year of chemistry meant that I was lost from my first class and I never caught up. I attended two more years and didn't understand much.

The reason I trawl out that little snippet from my personal background is that the three 'Nightfall Detective Agency' books remind me of those chemistry classes. There's stuff here that seems cool and worthy and sometimes the reactions are fantastic, but I have little clue what's going on. Now, I talked about this when reviewing the first of them, 'The Mummy's Vengeance', because I hadn't quite realised that it was the first in a trilogy of novellas spun off from the middle trilogy of books in a trilogy of trilogies that's always expanding. I didn't talk about it when reviewing 'Trail of the Zombies' because it felt like I'd caught up by that point and everything made sense. This time, it's clear that I haven't.

Before I dive into what's here, I want to ask why this is the end of a trilogy. Sure, some story arcs are resolved here, but this could easily run as a series. The scope is glorious: some characters are effectively immortal and got to 1929 the long way round, while others time travelled there from the future, where the 'Jigsaw' series presumably some sort of roots. There are a whole slew of more monsters to expand this and the fight against fascism and authoritarianism is so universal, pun not intended, that it's never going to seem old. Just look at the news. We're doing it right now in America. But, hey, apparently this is it for the 'Nightfall Detective Agency', at least in dedicated books.

Maybe its operatives will appear in further 'Jigsaw' books as supporting characters. Certainly, the notes on the page after the story wraps suggests that next up is 'Jigsaw: Temporal Apocalypse' in 2026, presumably the beginning of a new trilogy. However, these notes also suggest that there is another 'Nightfall Detective Agency' novella coming in 2026 too, perhaps contradicting the back cover blurb, which tells us that this is "the explosive final chapter". Maybe that translates to the end of one spinoff trilogy but a sequel trilogy to the spinoff trilogy being spun up.

So to the story, after a quick reintroduction of characters as grounding, something that, rather surprisingly, David Alyn Gordon seems unwilling to do within the text.

Prof. Abraham Mueller is a werewolf, currently living in Tucson, who's been around since the days of the pharaohs. Tori Jacobsen is a Temporal Guardian from Tempe in our time but who has been turned into a vampire and gone back to the twenties a little further south. They're the good guys, along with a staff of others, and together they run the Nightfall Detective Agency. Of course, it's not just them because there are a wealth of other good guys, from sidelined journalists to Native American skinwalkers, all lending their limbs to the cause. These novellas may run past quickly but they have busy casts.

The bad guys initially seem to be human. Edwin Cranston is a fascist who wants to replace Hoover in the White House and plans to stand for Governor of Arizona as an initial step. Behind him is his wife Pamela's father, Leopold Sancroft, a textbook corporate monster. However, they're precisely what they appear to be. The bigger bad guys aren't, because they're monsters passing as others and manipulating the regular bad guys into unwittingly meeting their own agendas. In particular, there's Lilith, the ancient vampire who turned Tori, presumably in one of the 'Jigsaw' novels, and her daughter Lili, a Jinn freed from her jar, into which she was placed by the prophet Muhammad and his counsellor Abram, now a certain Prof. Mueller. Damn, he's seen some history!

It doesn't take much to figure out who Lilith and Lili are here, but I won't spoil that. I'll just point out that the battle commences quickly and continues throughout, using any means to hand and, quite frankly, any troops to hand. Skinwalkers? Sure! Werewolf zombies? Absolutely! The broader time travelling Foundation from the main 'Jigsaw' series? Of course! Gordon throws everyone into the mix here, even taking us back to superhero vs. supervillain battles in 6,250 BC. And really, it's that sort of mindset throughout, so a plot summary wouldn't help. It's good guys vs. bad guys at a pace that soon becomes frenzied.

I'm on board with that sort of thing, which is why I'm still reading and reviewing three books into a series that I've struggled with in other ways. Gordon's ideas are great and he clearly has a heck of a lot of fun choreographing these campaigns. However, sometimes it feels like it's not much more than choreography. Late on, it becomes almost a list of stage directions. Transformations, which are frequent, are also instant. Characters teleport in and out of scenes. It gets increasingly hard to keep track of who's actually in a room at any particular moment and what form they're taking, something that may be worse for people like me who have aphantasia and so can't see images in our heads.

Having now read three, possibly all three, 'Nightfall Detective Agency' books, I can say that this is an ongoing approach rather than an anomaly. While Gordon's 'Jigsaw' books tend to run to novel length, albeit never doorstops, these spinoffs are novellas. This one runs a hundred and seventy or so pages, probably twenty of which are blank pages in between chapters, so it's hardly a hefty volume. However, it feels like there are about five books worth of material condensed into those pages, meaning that everything feels skimpier than it should be.

And that's what's most firmly stuck in my head as I leave this trilogy, at least after recommending that nobody take the same approach I did. If you want to read Gordon, figure out the order of the 'Jigsaw' books and read them. If you like them, continue on into the 'Nightfall Detective Agency', but don't start there. Other than that, I want to read this as a substantial series rather than this condensed take. If every three page chapter was expanded to an eight page chapter and Gordon included recaps and character background where needed, not through separate chapters set all over the historical calendar, but in the traditional manner of thought and description, I think I'd be recommending these to all and sundry. Right now, I'm giving out cautions and wishing for the series it isn't. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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