Frey is usually just a victim of his own stupidity, he’s good for a fight and a bit of repartee, and he’s fun to laugh at. And perhaps that’s why I found the Iron Jackal as deliciously spooky as I did. This is why I have enjoyed Crake’s portions of the books so much, I think, because he gets all the creepy, more-dark-than-light bits of storyline.

Something that has impressed me about Wooding’s writing from the start has been how quickly he can move from banter and action to chills-down-your-spine scenes of daemonic meddlings. So everyone throws themselves wholeheartedly into the adventure this time round, even poor, nerve-shot Harkins.Īnd Frey needs all the help he can get, because the Iron Jackal is a very real, very scary thing. His crew too, in facing the possible end to their time on the Ketty Jay, are beginning to realise just how much they appreciate what their airship home gives them (freedom, protection, safe haven, escape). He’s looking death in the face and deciding what kind of person he is, and even I, his least fond reader, have to tip my hat to him because he discovers reserves of mental fortitude he (and we) didn’t know he had. That’s no small thing though, and we get to appreciate how much Frey has grown up in this book. So from the get go – beginning with a lively chase across the sun-drenched rooftops of a Samarlan city – we’re thrown into a race against time to save Frey from a fate worse than de… yeah, OK, from death. There are three things, in my humble opinion, that Wooding does really well: he can write the heck out of an opening scene he can create a creepy, horror-movie amount of tension out of thin air and he provides his characters with brilliant banter. And when Frey falls into a life-threatening predicament, his crew are there, ready and waiting to help however they can. Not equally they’re not all loved up or anything like that, there’s not much affection spared for Pinn, for example, or Harkins, but the group feels tight nonetheless. They know who and what they’re fighting for when they wade in, and they care about each other. We’ve learned enough about them, and they’ve learned enough about each other, that they feel solid. What I liked most about The Iron Jackal is that the crew is a crew now and they’ve all realised it. It’s dieselpunk Indiana Jones all the way, baby. After the fairly grim happenings in The Black Lung Captain the crew are back on form here, quipping their way through a fast paced adventure involving an ancient relic, a deadly curse and a lost city.

It has more of everything I’ve enjoyed in this series and a whole lot less of the stuff that was irking me. This is my favourite Ketty Jay book so far. “Welcome to the crew of the Ketty Jay … You ain’t a member till you’ve caused at least one major catastrophe.”

The iron jackal chris wooding