Review: Goodbye Jack Nightingale
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 02 11, 2014
Jack Nightingale is dead.  LASTNIGHT opens in a morgue, where Chalmers is standing over a burnt crisp of a body that DNA evidence proves unequivocally is Jack's.  So as Stephen Leather promised when he released the last of the original Jack Nightingale Trilogy, he was done with the character.  Convinced by his publishers to write a few more he (reluctantly?) agreed to two more, and then that was it (plus a short story or two).  So here we are at the end.Two weeks earlier, Chalmers asks for Jack's help (yes I know this is sort of like Peter Parker asking the Green Goblin for help on a science problem) on a case involving 5 dead Goths, murdered in an unusually grisly fashion with their flesh cut to ribbons and left to bleed out.  Chalmers et al. are completely stumped and the higher-ups are screaming for some action, so he reluctantly turns to Jack because he "knows about that sort of thing".  The first 40% of the book is just good old Jack doing regular detective stuff, smoking lots of Marlboros and trying to get his MG to work and bumming rides off of Jenny when it doesn't.  There is little or none of the occult stuff that has marked all the other novels.As Jack gets closer to the truth, bit by bit by dint of good detective work, people close to him start dying in horrible fashion and we leave familiar London and enter the familiar twilight zone of Satanists, demons and universal payback that is Jack's true existence since his father sold his soul to a devil before he was born.  One absolutely MUST read the preceding 4 novels, because once the Satanism and demonology appears, there are references to key events in almost all the preceding novels.  If you haven't read them, your probably won't even notice what you're missing, but you might wonder who the heck Perry Smith is and how Nightingale got mixed up with him, and the same for some other key players.  Same for references to Nightingale's previous life as a cop.  All are essential pieces of how he got to be where and what he is today.The novel rolls along at Stephen Leather's usual brisk pace, there is witty banter between Jack and Jenny, his secretary (allegedly). Near the end of the novel, as the body count rises and Jack is forced in to making some really difficult choices, things speed up towards a breakneck conclusion.  I have to admit that I pretty much figured out the ending about three quarters of the way through the novel, as you probably will too if you've been paying attention to for the first 4 and three quarter novels.Not the best of the 5 Jack Nightingale novels (I think 3-NIGHTMARE and 4-NIGHTSHADE were the best - 5 stars each), but a fine conclusion to a great series.Highly Recommended (but only AFTER reading entries 1-4 first).J.M. Tepper