Mark Gatiss - The Devil in Amber

Got this (a "special limited proof edition - not for resale") as a freebie at the writers' festival and was pleased to have picked it up, seeming to promise as it did to be lurid in the extreme. Set in period immediately after the Great War, it chronicles the efforts of Lucifer Box, Esq (by appointment to his majesty - ie, in his majesty's secret service) to unravel a literally fiendishly complex plot involving drug-running, gangsters, organised fascism, his estranged sister Pandora, a mysterious convent, raising of nuns from the dead, centuries-old conspiracies and attempts to summon the Devil, all the while preening himself, trying to convince himself that, though he's slowing down, he's not yet past it, and having it off with or at least eyeing with lascivious intent a succession of yummy boys and girls. A bit of piffle, really, but enjoyable - though the steamy mixed-race nun sex (coitus interrupted by the manifestation of the face of a disembodied ghastly goatish apparition, no less) was almost too much.