Meet Skulduggery Pleasant: wise-cracking detective, powerful magician, sworn enemy of evil.
Oh yes. And dead.
So what's the story?: Gordon Edgley, a famous horror writer, dies suddenly and leaves his entire estate to his favourite twelve-year-old niece, Stephanie. She sees A Mysterious Man with questionable choice in hairpieces and appropriate clothing for summer at both the funeral and the reading of the will - where the only thing he recieves is rather cryptic advice, while Stephanie is given her Uncle's estate. When Stephanie is attacked while spending the night at her new house, The Mysterious Man is the one who charges in and rescues her, revealing three things about himself: 1) He can set people on fire, 2) He's quite matter-of-fact when faced with people who can smash down doors and are apparantly quite fine with being set on fire, and 3) He's a skeleton. From there, Stephanie manages to convince him to take her with him on his Quest Against Evil - or at least, against the man who killed him, who seems to be trying to get his hands on an unbeatable weapon that is purely mythical and bring back a race that may or may not have ever existed.
Reaction Shot: I really, really like this book. The story moves at a great pace, some of the dialogue is truly brilliant, and the characters are wonderful - even the ones that are only mentioned as a one off, like Stephanie's dad's secretary. Some of more important characters - well quite a few - are complete over-the-top stereotypes (Why hello Stephanie's odious moneygrubbing aunt, uncle and cousins!), some are enigmas (China Sorrow is one of these; she won't work for either side, and is willing to hinder the protaganists if she thinks that their actions are going to cause trouble for her, then turn around later to help them.), some aren't as fleshed out as I'd like (Tanith Low, for example), but what we see of them is good. And the entire Stephanie-and-Skulduggery dynamic is incredible. There's banter, sarcasm, Skulduggery genuinely worrying about Stephanie and Stephanie genuinely pwning Skulduggery. The plot itself has been done before, but Landy handles it really well, and even when he seems to be pulling things out of nowhere (Well, it's like a magician pulling things from thin air; you know he's got them up his sleeves when you think about it, but when he actually does the trick you don't see it.), it doesn't seem as jarring as you might expect.
... And if you get the same copy as I did, the book looks like someone took an orange highlighter to the edges of the pages. I recommend it just to add some colour to your reading pile.
It's not perfect: But as all my problems with the book - the story's kinda... Well, "linear" is the only word that's coming to me, some of the dialogue and exposition is clunky as hell or not what you'd expect for someone of that age, the writing is very... Well, Landy's a script writer, so however awesome the dialogue is the action can't keep up, the ending felt a little rushed to me (although considering the POV at that point, I can understand it) and I want to know how some of the characters manage to walk out of things as well as they do (Skulduggery, after the torture thing I am looking at you.) - can be excused as "It's a child's book, what did you expect?" and the quality of the story even with them, so it's pretty damn close.
The Verdict: Has a few problems, but it's generally a really good read!
For those who are interested, there's sample chapter (in PDF format) on the Skulduggery Pleasant website.
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