Nightingale's Lament, Hex and the City, Burn

Audible had a 3 for 2 on series books, and I used two of them on the next two Nightside books.

Nightingale's Lament was interesting, but more for the odd powers that Green gives some of his characters than for any particular plot reasons.

In Hex and the City, though, he moves the story in a new direction.  Green has dropped hints in the first three books about the origin of the nightside and about protagonist John Taylor's mother.  I'm used to getting these sorts of dribs and drabs of backstory in other series (Butcher does it a lot in the Dresden Files), and it can be a bit irritating; it feels like a way to stretch out a minor mystery that may never be resolved.  But in Hex and the City, Green moves the backstory into center stage, which I think is a bold move.

Unfortunately, the boldness is offset by somewhat shaky execution.  The Nightside series in general is patterned like a hard-boiled mystery series.  One thing that Green should've absorbed from other books in the genre is that, while there may be many false leads for the detective, each one usually brings him a bit closer to his quarry.  But, here, Taylor has a series of confrontations with putative witnesses, and each one ends up saying a variation of "I don't know the answer and I can't even guess.  Maybe you should try someone else."  Although those confrontations are interesting in their own right, any one could have been left out without changing the flow of the story at all.

Overall, though, Green's resolution of so many issues in one swoop sets the novel above the previous two in the series, and is enough to keep me going through the next one.

Speaking of noir mysteries, Burn is a throw-back to older crime fiction.  Unfortunately, author Sean Doolittle doesn't really do anything new or innovative.  I wanted to like this, because I kind of liked Rain Dogs.  But, just like that book had a by-the-numbers quality to it, so did this one, except that nothing really stood out at all.

Agents of Light and Darkness, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

Not much to say about Agents of Light and Darkness.  It was short but fun; Green is good at juggling a humorous tone with some darker undertones.

Casanova's Chinese Restaurant is the fifth book in A Dance to the Music of Time.  Although you can read the whole work as one massive volume, this novel shows that Powell paid close attention to the structure of each individual book.  The novel opens with Jenkins reminiscing about the titular restaurant, reflecting that there's now a crater where the restaurant used to be.  The crater is the result of bomb dropped during the Blitz, and is a sign that events leading up to WWII are going to become more prominent now.  Indeed, this is the first novel where the outside world really intrudes, however lightly.  One character goes off to help out in the Spanish Civil War, there's more talk about the Nazis, and so on.

Casanova's also underpins the structure by book-ending the novel.  We're introduced to a couple of major figures in this novel at a meal there near the beginning, and there's a reflection back to that meal near the end.  In addition, the restaurant serves as a bit of pivot point between past and present.  We have Jenkins's current present, in which the restaurant is now a crater.  We have the "present" that most of the novel is set in.  But we also have a past before that, in which Deacon (who passed in away in vol. 2, if I recall correctly) shares a meal with Jenkins and others at the restaurant.

There are also a few pairings which undergird the structure of the novel.  Most obvious are the two musicians, Morland and McClintock.  But we also have two miscarriages at the start of the novel, linking Morland's and Jenkins's marriages.  McQuiggen and Members are still paired, as in previous volumes.

The one complaint I have is that there's a huge hole in the novel where Isabelle should be.  Powell tries to get around this by having Nick tell us that no-one can write objectively about his own marriage, but that feels sloppy to me.  Nobody can really write objectively about any marriage (as Nick also tells us), but other peoples' marriages fill the pages of these books.

The Thing from the Nightside

Simon Green's Thing from the Nightside was entertaining fluff.  For what it's trying to be, it's perfect, and I guess you can't ask for more than that.