Teaser Tuesday 6/4/2019: “The Night Watch Collection”

So this week I’m still reading The Night Watch Collection, by Sergie Lukyanenko. At this point I’m well into the last book of the trilogy, Twilight Watch, which so far is my favorite of the three.

Although these books are most definitely fantasy, the later stories (and these are stories; each novel essentially consists of novellas that are largely independent, yet build on each other) have strong elements of the detective genre interlaced with complex intelligence operations that the Night Watch and the Day Watch run against each other as they try to gain an advantange in their ongoing cold war — sort of like The Usual Suspects meets The Doorbell Rang, only with multiple Keyser Sozes and an FBI staffed by wizards and witches. The common thread is usually Anton Gorodetsky, the main character of Night Watch, who’s essentially the Archie Goodwin of the series, in that he’s a pretty sharp investigator himself, but not as sharp as his boss, who for his own reasons likes to keep his operatives in the dark. (Not to be confused with the Dark.)

In this little snippet from Twilight Watch, Anton has gone undercover to try to track down a rogue Other who’s running a scam on a human by promising to turn him into an Other, which is impossible. Or is it?

I put on my suit and knotted my tie, splashed on the eau de cologne that Ignat had chosen for me the day before, dropped my phone into my inside pocket . . . “Only dumb kids and sales assistants carry their cells on their belts!”—that was one of Gesar’s helpful little homilies.

The cell was new and still unfamiliar. It had different kinds of games in it, a built-in music-player, a dictaphone, and all sorts of other nonsense entirely unnecessary in a phone.

Hey, Anton, in a few more years, you’re going to consider the phone portion of your cell the entirely unnecessary nonsense …

Meanwhile, work continues on Father’s Books! At this point I’m still doing a round of paper editing; this pass was supposed to be just to fix typos, but of course I kept finding little changes I wanted to make to wording or paragraphs, so it turned into a round of regular editing. The next pass will be strictly for typos, I swear.

As they made their way up the driveway, cruising at a slow hobble, Rose said: “So do you always carry a gun around in your trunk?”

“Sure. Don’t you?”

She couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not. “No. Should I?”

“If you’re planning to keep doing things like this? Probably.”