Book review: The Gathering Dark, by James Oswald

Workmanlike” may seem tepid praise to bestow on a book. Yet if the novel is, sometimes at least, a work of art, writing a novel is a craft, and craftsmanship matters. Evelyn Waugh believed that a novel should be as well-made as fine furniture, and the first pleasure of James Oswald’s novel is that the author knows what he is doing and how to bring it off. This is satisfying, all the more so because Oswald takes risks. His novel is a hybrid. On the one hand it’s an unusually competent and humane police procedural; on the other there is an element of the supernatural. In a lesser craftsman this might make for an uneasy marriage, indeed an unconvincing one.