The Domino Men
By Jonathan Barnes
Morrow, $24.99, 400 pages
Henry Lamb works at the Civil Service Archive Unit, running papers around the Storage and Record Retrieval section. His life is boring and tedious until the day he is expected to take on his comatose grandfather’s responsibilities as a covert operation. He learns that England is fighting a secret war shoved on it by a dead queen. The Directorate, a shady organization known to only a few people, wish to recruit Lamb to their cause, and all he has to do is pretty simple: find “the girl” and protect the world from the evil Leviathan who is almost ready to destroy the city. But this task isn’t as easy as Henry would like it. There is the sole survivor to the British throne, Prince Arthur Aelfric Vortigern Windsor, who has seen salivating visions of near limitless power and has addictive tendancies towards the powerful narcotic Ampersand. And worse than him are the Domino Men, two serial killers who enjoy toppling the city to the ground just for a laugh.
Reviewed by James Rojek
