Thicker Than Water, by Mike Carey


Finally, the fourth of Carey’s supernatural detective stories. I didn’t know much about Carey, but someone convinced me to read the first of these books, and I enjoyed it far more than I’d expected. I felt there was a slight dip in quality in the third volume – it just felt a little too repetitive – but I was still looking forward to this one, and I’m very glad that Carey seems to have struck off in a direction that negates my concerns. Or, of course, it may be that the long delay between books three and four has whetted my appetite. Either way, this was great fun, and I’m now very much looking forward to the next one A subplot that had been bubbling under in the previous books comes to the fore here – Carey tries to make new readers welcome, but I suspect you really need to have read at least the first book for everything to make sense – and ends on a cliffhanger that is properly shocking, a rare enough thing in series fiction.

There’s a pretty good plot here, as well as the metastory stuff, although Carey keeps the reader as much in the dark as Felix Castor, his hero. Castor has a nasty time of it this time around, getting beaten up, framed for murder and so on. His much-vaunted exorcist skills aren’t a lot of use, and instead he must rely on his wits, friends and contacts. It isn’t very surprising that he finds this quite hard. Carey is also very good at place – his London is very recognisable, and his grim estates and neon-lit hospitals are very evocative of the underworld in which Castor plys his trade. My only real criticism is a slight tendency for the other characters to be pushed into the background – perhaps unsurprising given the first person narrative – but there are a couple of welcome new additions to the cast here, and the interplay is generally well done.

There are still some elements of similarity to Hellblazer (which Carey used to write) that can’t quite be shaken off, but as the series progresses and starts to create its own mythology, the echoes grow fainter. This is a really fun series, well-written and a joy to read, but it really should be started at the beginning. Crime fans shouldn’t let the horror trappings put them off, and horror/fantasy/s-f people shouldn’t worry about the attempts to locate the book in the mainstream. They’re well worth a try, and I’m very pleased that this book brings the series back up to the heights we know it can achieve.

I had to wait for the book to actually come out, boo, and for me to finish the Nick Cave book, so I didn't get around to this until the last week of May. Out now, ISBN: 1841496561.