Hell to Pay (Nightside, #7)

The Barnes & Noble Review The illegitimate love child of Raymond Chandler and H. P. Lovecraft...equal parts The Twilight Zone, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Dante's Divine Comedy ...H. R. Giger meets Monty Python's Flying Circus. Simon R. Green's Nightside saga -- an audacious amalgam of mystery, fantasy and horror -- may be impossible to accurately describe, but these action-packed, breakneck-paced adventures featuring private investigator John Taylor may quite possibly be the most addictively readable series around. In Hell to Pay, the seventh in Green's Nightside sequence ( Something from the Nightside, Agents of Light and Darkness, et al.), Taylor -- a butt-kicking private eye who specializes in cases of "the weird and uncanny" -- is faced with his most potentially lucrative case yet. One of the Nightside's most wealthy residents, an immortal named Jeremiah Griffin, offers Taylor 10 million pounds to find his granddaughter Melissa, a soon-to-be 18-year-old who simply disappeared from the Griffin mansion. Taylor accepts the case but soon finds himself treading on dangerous ground; in a powerful family with more than their fair share of dirty little secrets, some would do anything to keep those secrets from surfacing The reasons behind the wild success of Green's Nightside novels aren't exactly hard to figure out; set in one of the coolest locales ever imagined (the subterranean city-within-a-city underneath London proper) and featuring a never-ending cast of over-the-top characters (Shotgun Suzie, Dead Boy, Razor Eddie, et al.), these novels are as hilarious as they are unadulterated literary fun. Paul Goat Allen