“The name is Bond, Shaman Bond.” Shaman Bond is the alter ego of Edwin Drood, the hero of Simon R. Green’s The Secret Histories series, each with a title that parodies the title of a James Bond novel. So far, there’s been three other books in the series, The Man with the Golden Torc, Daemons Are Forever, and The Spy Who Haunted Me.
In the fourth one, From Hell With Love, Drood–who, along with the rest of his long-lived family, have the job of protecting humanity from “the things that go bump in the night”– faces one of the biggest challenges of his career. The rest of the family believe that either he or his girlfriend, Molly Metcalf (a witch) has murdered the Matriarch, the family’s leader. They, in turn, crazed by a need for vengeance, or something else, tear into Molly with all of the considerable weapons their golden armour contains, slicing and dicing her with abandon.
Eddie has to clear his and Molly’s names, and also defeat the evil (but generally bungling) genius, Doctor Delirium, and wrest the powerful Apocalypse Door from his grasp before he uses it to unleash the spawn of Hell upon the Earth. As if this was not enough, Eddie also has to find and go after the Immortals, or anti-Droods, the force that has infiltrated the Drood family and are bent on wiping the family out for good. It’s all in a day’s work for our intrepid secret agent.
Simon R. Green is at the top of his form with From Hell With Love. It’s a great addition to his series–full of clever humor and wordplay, pop and literary references, and colorful secondary characters like Springheel Jack, a woman immortalized by endless waking, a talking dragon head, and the Spawn of Frankenstein. More Droods get killed and more battles take place than in the previous Secret Histories novels, so it’s darker in tone than they were, but there’s still a lot of Green’s trademark brand of biting wit and humor here to help lighten the mood.
If you like the Urban Fantasy and spy genres, then Simon R. Green’s From Hell With Love is a novel that’s a definite must-read. It parodies Ian Fleming’s Bond series, but in a playful and entertaining way. You don’t have to have read the other novels in the series to understand and get into it, either, though they’re all ones I’d recommend. If you like spy novels that are shaken, stirred, and extremely twisted, From Hell With Love is an hellaciously fun read you’ll want to check out!
