Magical writer casts his spell

CHILDREN'S FICTION: Skulduggery Pleasant: Mortal Coil By Derek Landy Harper Collins, 572pp, £12.99IN THE COVER illustration of this thrilling and magical new novel – the fifth in the series – Derek Landy's ace detective Skulduggery Pleasant looks like a man under pressure. His trademark wide-brimmed hat gives him his suave, cool look – quite an achievement for a man going through life with a skeleton's head – but muscly human hands are reaching to grab him, to bring him down.

On the back it’s even scarier. There’s a giant of a man with a metal mask who, we soon learn, is Tesseract, a fantastic creation and an assassin sent to kill Davina Marr, the detective who made it her mission to pin something on the famously elusive Skulduggery. The latest instalment in the Skulduggery series is everything Landy’s fans have come to expect: tense, funny and – this is the crucial thing about the writer – magical. Not in a wishy-washy spells way: Landy’s characters live in a Dublin where evil Remnants inhabit the bodies of ordinary-looking people and the oddest-named characters (Landy’s names are brilliant) have powers ranging from those of an old woman who can speak every mortal language in the world to those of the sorcerer librarian China Sorrows, whose invisible tattoos come alive at the touch.

Mortal Coiltakes up seamlessly from the fourth book, Dark Days, where the cliff-hanger plot ended with Skulduggery's sidekick, teenage sleuth Valkyrie Cain, discovering she is in fact Darquesse, a powerful sorcerer who, according to visions, will destroy the world. But can she change her future? That's the plot driver in Mortal Coil. Can a grim destiny be changed if you fight hard enough? It's a powerful theme.

Landy knows his readers – who range from about 10 years of age into adulthood – and they know him. He doesn’t see the need to backtrack, to constantly remind his readers what has gone before in the series. But, just for those who haven’t met his cast of ne’er-do-well, zombies and sorcerers, the key facts are that Skulduggery Pleasant is a maverick Bentley-driving – and quite dead – detective with magical powers, and Valkyrie Cain is a Dublin teenager who is Stephanie to her parents but can sneak out to take part in all manner of scrapes, leaving behind her reflection to live her day-to-day life. What teenager wouldn’t want this magical doppelganger who can stay safely at home in suburbia, leaving her free to live a parallel and far more exciting life?

In the first four books Skulduggery and Valkyrie were a tight team, beating off the disasters that befell the Sanctuary, the governing body of the magic community in Dublin. Now even the independence of the Sanctuary is under threat from other Sanctuaries in the world, especially in America, who consider it precarious and believe a takeover might be in order. The Dublin Sanctuary is also under attack from the Remnants, evil spirits who have been locked away for thousands of years. Against this tense backdrop, and for the first time, Valkyrie is keeping a secret from Skulduggery: she feels she can’t reveal that she is Darquesse, believing that she has the power to seal the name so that the visions of world destruction doesn’t come to pass. It’s a big ask for a 16-year-old, even one with such an array of powers.

Throughout Mortal Coilthe imagery is vivid and the dialogue dry and witty, such as this exchange between Skulduggery and a zombie: " 'Why are you after us? We haven't done anything wrong,' pleaded the zombie. 'You're zombies.' 'But we haven't killed anyone.' 'Yes you have.' 'Recently. We haven't killed anyone, recently.' " It's the sort of exchange you'd find in a noir detective novel between a gun-toting detective and his bad-guy victim who knows his time is up.

It has been a big year for Landy. Skulduggery Pleasanthas been named the Irish book of the decade – think of all the Irish novels, some Booker winners, that were published in the past decade – and this is his second Skulduggery adventure to be published in 2010.

Some readers may find the plot less packed with the psychological intrigue that underlay the complex story of Dark Days. But Landy is above all a superb storyteller with an imagination as full of glittering nuggets as King Solomon's Mines, and Mortal Coilis as thrilling, compelling and downright smart as its four predecessors.

Bernice Harrison is an

Irish Times

journalist