So, this is a pretty standard Nightside book. For those who don't know the series, the Nightside is a hidden city reachable through London, where if Simon Greene can come up with it, it can and will exist there, probably buying services that would be illegal anywhere else. Greene is very good in somehow combining noir sensibilities, where everything is gray and shady, with a world where everything can be true and things are a bit over the top. Somehow it works.

Anyway, this book was kind of meh for me. It almost was like Greene took two novellas and stuck them together to make a short book. TGtBatU wasn't any shorter than the average novel in the series, but the fact the first chapters had only a tangental relationship to the second half of the book, we got a chapter from another character's POV about how he accidentally freed Queen Mab from Hell years ago, and the narrative payout seems to have been deferred to the next book, it make the book feel shorter.

The first story was Our Hero, John Taylor, taking a job from an elf lord to get him out of the Nightside with a treaty that would end the war between Oberon and Titania's elves and Mab's. Of course the Powers that Be in the Nightside, as represented by Walker, would rather the elves stick to warring among themselves, so we get a good old fashioned 'running the gauntlet' scene. Given I had just finished The Man with the Golden Torc and that I remember at least one or two other scenes in theNightside series where John and a friend with a car have to brave Nightside traffic, I suspect Greene has a real thing for writing these.

There are two things I like here. The first is that Taylor's power -- the ability to find anything and occasionally remove it -- is shown to have a weakness, in that he eventually ends up running on fumes. Since the previous ones had been bought off through the narration, it's a nice reminder while this is an awesome power -- he can find abstract concepts, such as 'what is this thing's weakness', he can remove bullets from guns, fillings from mouths and the specific wavelength of moonlight that causes werewolves to change from the spectrum -- it doesn't make Taylor invincible.

The second might seem like a minor thing to most people. Taylor recruits the help of Ms. Fate, a crime-fighting superheroine who happens to be male in her mundane identity. Greene (or Greene-writing-Taylor) used the correct pronouns for her -- the only times Ms. Fate was referred to by masculine pronouns was when speaking of her mundane identity. While the idea of a man dressing up as a woman to fight crime is something easily mocked, the character got as much respect as any crime-fighter. (In other words, while comic-book tropes, especially female superhero tropes, might be silly, the character is treated as a real person.)

Anyway, part two was another case, interwoven with Taylor's conflict with Walker. Walker is retiring -- in the old-fashioned way, which is 'through a coffin' -- and wants Taylor to take over his job. As much as Taylor considers himself a force for good (mostly) in the Nightside and admits Walker has crazy amounts of power as the guy who turns policy into results, he doesn't particularly want to do what Walker does, which is keep order at any cost. Which was a nice narrative conflict, to go with the footwork as Taylor tracks down a missing friend with the friend's brother, but again, it felt short.

Overall, this is the kind of book you get because you enjoy the series, but it won't make any converts.