I guess I slipped up by choosing 'The Mummy's Vengeance' as my Arizona book for July. While it's the first case file in David Alyn Gordon's 'Nightfall Detective Agency' series, at least some of the key characters were established elsewhere, presumably his primary 'Jigsaw' series, which I now believe I should have read first. But hey, those are science fiction novels, while this novella is a Universal monsters pulp horror story. It seemed entirely isolated and I was in a moment where my mind wanted to dive into this genre rather than that.

At least, the story itself is standalone, so it's easy to follow without any need for background; I didn't realise I was in trouble until chapter five, by which point I was invested. Back in 1317 BCE in Memphis—the one in Egypt, just in case—there's a major confrontation between the heretic worshippers of Aten and the establishment. High Priest Sennefer curses General Nakhtmin to wander the Earth forever, locked out of the all-important next life, but is run through with the general's sword for his troubles. A mercenary called Abram appears to be immortal already, so this act at least doubles their number.

After a chapter set in Royal Oak, Michigan in 1920 to establish that an industrialist by the name of Malcolm Thorne is a bad guy, we join him three years later at an archaeological dig that he's sponsoring outside Memphis. You can guess where and you won't be shocked to learn that Lord Carnarvon is dead in the Valley of the Kings, possibly to a Pharaoh's curse. Project lead Trevor Grantham holds no credence in that, but does get to see two workers buried in a tremor. What we learn from that is that Thorne is outrageously callous, Mehemet Andoheb is a troublemaker and Grantham has a rival in Julian Spade.

And then, just because we've spent a couple of chapters in the same place at the same time, we find ourselves whisked on again to Los Angeles in 1928 and the house of Prof. Abraham Mueller. Here's where I started to ask questions, because everything thus far had made sense within the context of the story but I had no idea why Mueller is a werewolf, how or when Lilith made Tori a vampire and where the professor's pet project, Frank the Golem, came from. There's a heck of a lot going on here, but it's all happening in short chapters without any explanations for those of us new to the series.

And, as I discovered that Tori is a Temporal Guardian who hails from Tempe in our time but has somehow gone back to 1928 and that Abraham the werewolf is also Abram the immortal, I took a moment to do some research, which wasn't as trivial as it perhaps ought to be. That's because everything Gordon writes seems to tie to his 'Jigsaw' series, but the books aren't numbered and are broken up into trilogies that appear to have different names depending on where I look. It seems that Tori's story begins in 'History's Forgotten: Part One', which is presumably also 'The Face of the Joker', given that it involves the Universal movie 'The Man Who Laughs'.

If I'm understanding correctly, then the first 'Jigsaw' trilogy is 'Beginnings', 'Warheads' and 'Full Circle'. Then the series expands its cast to continue with the 'History's Forgotten' trilogy, which were originally merely numbered parts but later became 'The Face of the Joker', 'Battle for the Final Frontier' and 'Saving Tomorrow'. Finally, there's a third trilogy, 'Powder Keg', 'Sonora' and 'Shadow Ball'. At least I think all these are trilogies, presumably with trilogy arcs along with the individual book arcs, but I won't know until I dive into them. Which I clearly should have done to start with, rather than start with a spinoff series from a middle trilogy.

So, let's shift back to this book and Los Angeles in 1928, where Sennefer shows up once more as a mummy being delivered to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Of course, those characters that left the first chapter as immortals are there under their new identities to move their respective agendas forward and... well, let's just say that nothing in a story that's already been told dozens of times is going to feel particularly surprising when told once more. What we need to tap into is the frantic sense of fun in which this adventure revels rather than any sort of mystery to solve.

And frantic may be the most important word here. Most of these 'Jigsaw' books are novels, not doorstop-sized epics but full-length novels nonetheless; but this is much shorter, wrapped up in a hundred and forty pages, which presumably makes it a novella. The thing is that it doesn't feel like the sort of novella that focuses on a less complex story and so doesn't need as many words to do it justice; it feels like a novel that's been viciously trimmed of half its words to fit into the smaller format. And, while that Readers Digest condensed version approach does make it feel even faster-paced, it also robs it of its depth. What's left are the bones without any flesh.

Therefore none of these characters have any real substance, even the ones who came to it from other books. The story is the same old mummy story. Any questions asked are simplistic and I'd suggest that most of them aren't even asked at all. We're whisked past them like the story isn't on the page in front of us but outside the windows of our 1928 automobile so they appear in the most impressionistic form. How much we're going to enjoy this is going to depend on whether a pulp adventure time travel Universal monsters ripping yarn sounds like our thing or not.

There's certainly a lot of cool stuff here and the occasional character, like Thorne's two kids who despise everything he stands for, have potential. The action is never more than a blink away, but it's also over in another blink. There's a serial rapist who's identified, found and drained by our vampire, all in less than a page. The shenanigans with history are omnipresent too and, to be a little brutal with my honesty, my favourite parts didn't revolve around the story at all.

They're the moments when Tori forgets that she's in 1928 so peppers conversation with cultural references to movies that don't exist yet. “A mummy, you say? Yeah, that Tom Cruise film sucked. Oh yeah, you'll probably remember the Boris Karloff movie instead.” Oops, that's in the future as well. There are far more references to from the eighties through to our present here than I would ever have expected in a book primarily set in 1928, but that's the fun. Of course, anyone who actually buys into the MAGA mindset won't like it, because of one particular reference, but they don't count. And this is entirely a Tori thing because Abraham took the long way round.

What that all boils down to is that I think I'm going to appreciate this 'Jigsaw' series that I didn't actually read here. What I did was inadvertently dive into a pulp horror spinoff from its middle trilogy that didn't make as much sense as it should have done if I'd have, well, followed Abram's approach and taken the long way round. Other than that, I dug the ideas here but not so much the way they were crunched into a threadbare novella instead of a novel with depth. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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