I thought long and hard before deciding to follow 'The Mummy's Vengeance', my Arizona book for July, with the next in its series, 'Trail of the Zombies'. The logical step would have been backward rather than forward, to David Alyn Gordon's main series, 'Jigsaw', to which I now realise 'Case Files from the Nightfall Detective Agency' is a spinoff. However, there are only two of them so far and I still felt like I wanted to read A Universal monster mystery thriller rather than A science fiction time travel adventure.

The good news is that most of my concerns about the first book aren't present here. The large one still apparent is the fact that there's a lot crammed into a novella's worth of pages, surely enough to warrant a deeper treatment over novel length. Also, there are a couple of moments where I'm sure it would have helped to have had the grounding that the 'Jigsaw' series would have given me. Fortunately, they're fleeting and hardly crucial, so it's not a big deal. I didn't feel out of my depth this time and it doesn't feel like Gordon was writing twice as much and cutting half of it out. It all flows a lot more naturally, even at novella length.

Well, except for the first chapter, which is such a cheesy horror cartoon setup that we should be forgiven for feeling like this is a parody. It isn't. It's anthropology professor Otto Wallace killed in his office at the University of Arizona. Frankly, the attack feels far more like something a mummy might have done in the first book, except for his histrionic reaction to the door being ripped off its hinges: "OH GOD, A ZOMBIE!" Things do calm down considerably as of chapter two and this opener is something of an anomaly, thank goodness, in more ways than one. But back to that later.

It's 1929 and we mostly stay there, a couple of establishing chapters in recent years and a couple of flashbacks to historical times, like 1521 and 135 CE, aside. The bad guys are far from cheesy horror cartoons, being a host of people with historical precedent who often honestly believed they were doing the right thing, even though we struggle to grasp that today. And I'm not talking about the actual Nazi, Herr Lenz, in Arizona to report back to Hitler, or hooded Klansmen marching through New Jersey in chapter four crying "America First". Gordon digs deeper than them in this book.

The two primary themes here are eugenics and Indian schools. Eugenics is the theory that we can improve the collective genetics of a population through science, whether that's through breeding programs or forced sterilisation. We know how far Hitler took that, but less extreme takes on the concept were seriously explored in the U.S. in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indian schools attempted to do something similar on a cultural basis, forcing Native Americans to talk, dress and even believe like Americans. To a young America that believed in manifest destiny, this was seen as bringing civilisation to the savages. More recently, we're seeing it as the cultural genocide that it truly was.

Of course, the Utopia Institute trawls in both of these historical themes. It was built during those setup chapters soon before 1929 by Malcolm Thorne, the wealthy Michigan industrialist who was a notable villain in the first book. Dason and Hania are among the first Native American boys to get there as transfers from Theodore Roosevelt schools. They're Navajo but they're renamed Daniel and Harold, their long hair is cut and everything they own that has cultural significance is burned. It might seem that Gordon is piling it on here, but this is real history and it carries serious power.

But back to zombies, because all of this ties together. Malcolm Thorne is there in chapter three as Monique DeVille hires Alexander Benoit onto a terrorist project she's leading, ironically under the aegis of Global Harmony. He's presumably a Haitian, where he was a doctor and plantation owner. More crucially, he's a bokor, who solved the problem of plantation workers stubbornly demanding to be paid by turning them into obedient slaves.

Zombies, in other words, and that cheesy opening chapter aside, Gordon acknowledges that this is the definition of zombies that people would know. Only Tori, who's from our time and just hanging out in 1929 for reasons I haven't yet discovered, thinks of a more modern equivalent that wants to eat your brains. There aren't as many slips on her side this time out, as she reacts to something in the way someone of her time would rather than someone of the time she's actually living in. Those moments were so much fun in the first book. I wonder why Gordon didn't throw in more here.

I wonder if there are any conclusions to draw from the fact that my notes while reading didn't tend to mention Tori and Mueller. By the way, why are they Tori and Mueller, rather than Tori and Bram or Jacobsen and Mueller? Regardless, I'm sure they did a lot here but I didn't see it as noteworthy. Maybe that's a good thing and I was just caught up in the action with them. However, I wrote much more about Malia, a young Navajo girl who's just as heroic. Dason and Hania are her brat cousins. I noted more about Monique DeVille, Malcolm Thorne and Alexander Benoit, all bad guys. I noted a lot more about Ida and Frank the Golem, who get important scenes. Did Tori and Bram do less this time out?

Maybe the series is just growing and I'm focusing more on supporting characters because that's a tendency of mine that I recognise from primetime TV shows. I rarely care about the leads who are played by actual stars. I care a lot more about the quirky support played by character actors. Here, however, Tori's a time travelling vampire and Bram's an immortal werewolf. They seem like quirky support to me, merely cast in leading roles. Maybe I'm letting this bug me more than I should.

After all, I enjoyed 'Trail of the Zombies' a lot more than I enjoyed 'The Mummy's Vengeance'. I'm still of the firm opinion that I should have read the 'Jigsaw' books first, but not doing so was much less of a problem this time out. What really matters is that this flows much better and it has more of a grounding in its time, not least through real historical events that are now national traumas. Explicitly tying those things to the rise of the Nazis in Europe and thematically to what's going on in the States today with MAGA is appropriate and biting. That connection felt cheap in book one. It doesn't here.

In fact, everything is better here, except for that first chapter and Gordon's abiding decision for a series that would be worthy at novel length to be told in novellas. But hey, it's his series. He can do what he wants with it. I'll happily keep on reading anyway. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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