Skulduggery Pleasant: Death Bringer also sees Landy bring an excellent compromise between the dry humour of Skulduggery and Valkyrie and the brutal nature of the story to create an intense bathos. Whilst reading, I was literally screaming my head of at Landy for being such a bastard and setting them against each other!) Even that relationship must come to an end, as much as I think Fletcher and Valkyrie are perfect for each other. Her relationship with Fletcher is the only grounding in reality she has because as Stephanie Edgeley, she is of course living a different lie. Like all good characters we’re not sure whether we love her or hate her imperfections, which can raise her from a low-life murderer to a hero within pages.

Valkyrie is now a egoistic and sassy sixteen year old. Landy has succeeded in creating an incredible growth in the characters. And Death Bringer? If there is such a thing, then Death Bringer is beyond excellent it’s a masterpiece perhaps, of modern middle-grade-come-young-adult writing. Dark Dayscatapulted the series into new (awesome) territories, and Mortal Coil vaulted Skulduggery and Valkyrie into excellence. Playing With Firewas good, but too similar to the first. It has been said and it needs saying again: this series gets better and better as it progresses. It’s hard not to love Landy for his excellent wit and writing, but at the same time I care so much for Valkyrie and Skulduggery and Fletcher and the lot, that anything Landy does to hurt them or bring them down is so offensive to me that I just want to beat him up for being so mean to his own characters. In the case of Derek Landy, this is all too good a description. The best authors make us, the readers, love and hate them. And that, my friends, is why our favourite Skeleton Detective and his accomplice, Valkyrie Cain, are out to stop them. Not so fun if you’re one of the three billion. With the Death Bringer on hand, the Necromancers hope to usher in the Passage and bring on the new and “glorious” world by killing three billion people. And now they’ve got someone to do it: a Death Bringer named Melancholia St Claire. Those petty little magical people who are so in love with Death that they want to knock down the barriers between the living and, well, the dead.

Death bringer by derek landy