By David Bishop

What to Expect: If you've read the previous volumes you'll already know. If not- two words: Samurai Vampires.

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Review by Richmond Clements

So, David Bishop returns to the Fiends series after a frankly fantastic trilogy of books.  This time, the story has moved from the eastern Front to the Far East, as Bishop reveals the true extent of Constanta’s involvement with the war.

My biggest gripe with not just the previous Fiends novels, but with a lot of the Black Flame output in general has been the length of the novels. A lot of them have felt constricted by a too rigid page count which has at times resulted in a story feeling too rushed towards the finale.

As with the Slaine books, this one has some extra length, so Bishop has room to tell the tale at his own pace, and boy does he make the most of it.

Bishop uses the extra space to introduce us to a new set of chracters. We’ve got an army Chaplain, and a Japanese bar owner and his sister as well as the usual cast of soldiers, sailors and pilots. We switch between them regularly, as events very gradually act to bring them all together. And the event that brings them together is no real surprise, being that this book is set in the Pacific just before America entered the Second World War. Indeed, the knowledge of what’s coming adds to the inevitability of the horror we’re waiting for.

Strangely enough, the one thing that I thought this book didn’t need was our old pal Constanta. He makes a brief appearance early in the book to ‘set the ball rolling’ as it where, but serves little purpose other than to link this book with the previous series. And now I shall go right out and almost contradict myself by saying that the prologue, featuring Constanta and Hitler, is still highly entertaining. 

The new ‘Boss Vampire’ as it were, is a much more interesting character than Constanta. His motivations and some of his actions after his ‘turning’ are most intriguing, and hopefully will lead to further intrigue and drama in later volumes.

But let us not loose sight of the meat of this book in our discussion of character motivation and the like. This is a cracking romp. It’s brilliantly paced, exciting and action packed. It has a cast of characters, both living and not, that thanks to the author taking his time over, we empathise with, so when Bad Things start to happen, some of them are genuine shocks and we care.

Whereas the previous trilogy where written in a fashion where they could have been enjoyed either single volumes or part of a larger tale, this book is very much the first part of an ongoing adventure. So, all I want to know is- when’s the next one out?

If you loved Bishops previous Fiends books, then you’ll love this one too.

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