I came late to the Skulduggery Pleasant series – starting with the third book, The Faceless Ones, and then following it with Dark Days, the fourth. I enjoyed Dark Days so much I’m now reading the first two books back to back!

For the uninitiated, Skulduggery Pleasant is a skeleton detective/sorcerer who works with his partner Valkyrie Cain (aka former ordinary Irish schoolgirl Stephanie Edgley) and a host of other characters to defeat the many powers of evil.

In Dark Days, Valkyrie must undertake a dangerous rescue mission to retrieve Skulduggery from a hellish dimension ruled by the Faceless Ones. There’s no time for her to take a breather afterwards, though. There’s the matter of the Desolation Engine – a bomb that could wipe out thousands – that has fallen into the wrong hands. I can’t say much more without spoiling a plot full of surprises, but I will say that the book ends with Valkyrie on the verge of a major identity crisis. This is smart, funny, contemporary fantasy that’s up there with the best, easily as good as the books of Cassandra Clare or Eoin Colfer.