Three days was all it took for London to run into the arms of chaos. The city embraced it willingly, all too eager to swap her staid old suitors of simmering calm and disgruntled order for this fresh admirer, this master swordsman of panic, anarchy and fear.

An underground civil war rages between the House of Windsor and, erm... some other people know as the Directorate. Unbeknown to Henry Lamb his family have been fighting the good fight for some generations. One day, our hero is flung from Civil Service filing drudgery into a life of rip roaring adventure - secret organizations, love affairs, the lot. Aside from the danger presented by the rollicking royals there are also the dreaded 'prefects' to contend with (who also appeared, if memory serves, in Jonathan Barnes' other novel The Somnambulist). Essentially lots of silly, OTT things happen, meaning as a reader you're never gripped with anything close to even mild peril and unless you have the most banal, puerile sense of humour, you're hardly likely to rolling in the aisles either.

I want to love this novel, as I wanted to love its predecessor. I believe the author has a great many good ideas, even if they are ridiculously silly, and a keen sense of ingenuity with narrative. But he doesn't quite have the talent to write them convincingly, or in enough detail, or with the depth they deserve.

Mildly amusing but with the potential to be truly brilliant, The Domino Men is toppled by it's own ambition.

The high concept is familiar: A bland everyman learns that he has inherited a crucial role in an age-old war between Good and Evil. In The Domino Men, everyman is Henry Lamb, as meek and ineffectual as his name, once a child actor by virtue of nepotism rather than talent, now a government file clerk timidly attracted to the pretty girl from whom he rents his flat. Good takes the form of the "Directorate", an organization about which he can learn nothing. (Google has blacked it out.) Evil emanates from Britain's royal family, party to a conspiracy beyond the wildest fantasies of Lyndon LaRouche.

The story moves forward with great verve, peopled by vividly drawn characters like the bewildered Prince of Wales (a late initiate into the conspiracy), the Directorate's aquatic leader, who maintains his HQ inside the London Eye, and the glib, cross-talking "domino men" of the title, a pair of vicious supernatural adolescents.

As is often the case with books of this sort, a little common sense and cooperation on the part of the heroes would forestall the villains by about page 40, and the resolution of the plot is rather arbitrary and capricious. Also, the purpose of Evil's scheme, once revealed, sounds like it was salvaged from Douglas Adams' wastebasket, quite out of keeping with the tone of the rest of the book. Facetious though the Domino Men are, this is occult horror, not slapstick comedy.

In the end, the author ties matters up deftly, though leaving room for, and all but promising, sequels.

While not a classic of its kind, The Domino Men is inventive, well-paced and witty, satisfying fare for a long weekend. ( )

Whether burned or bloody, Jonathan Barnes does love to see London in complete chaos. It happened in his last novel The Somnambulist, and has now continued in The Domino Men. Few things crossover between the two, save the intriguingly bizarre characters constituting his uber-secret and not-so-normal civil service division called The Directorate. Oh, and The Prefects, can't forget them.

The story centers around Henry Lamb, a completely ordinary though perhaps even dull, clerk who through a series of extraordinary though familial events is drawn into a hunt, a race to prevent London's descent into utter ruin. By all accounts he has no business within the Directorate or even approaching The Domino Men, the only ones who can either help or even destroy the chances for success.

Barnes excellently scripts his mystery around the fog that continually encompasses London, though he also lowers a fog over the reader's mind as well, keeping us in the dark about the major players of the novel. He offers breadcrumbs about the Directorate and the Domino Men, the comatose grandfather of Henry, and the ever over-confident mastermind Director Dedlock , though his description is never enough to quash the ever-lingering questions the reader may conjure. A frustrating yet gripping method. We know of a battle waged for centuries and that the Prefects are dangerous to say the least, but Barnes, hopefully in anticipation of another novel, tells us only what were allowed to know of the process. All that is requested is that we must "trust the process". And in the end, the distinction of who the villain was is not at all clear.

In several ways the Domino Men surpasses The Somnambulist; the ending is much more captivating though at times the pacing can be a bit slower. His inclusion and description of the aristocracy (Prince Arthur in particular) is quite interesting, for it is neither kind nor overtly cruel. The Prefects, however, were a bit under-described as they were in the former. Their playfully comic nastiness, hinted to atmospheric levels, falls just short of their behaviour, though admittedly ruthless and reckless as the story hits its crescendo. Their actions are more a vehicle of the story than the framework. Overall, its another fascinating story about London, manipulated by all creatures forceful and ubiquitously normal. Fun yet creepy, one can only wonder how many times and what twisted ways London has fallen and yet continues to rebuild itself in the mind of Barnes. ( )

Very funny, although there's an awful lot of dumping on Prince Charles. ( )

Since 1857, the British government - particularly, a supersecret agency known as the Directorate - has been at war with the House of Windsor to prevent the execution of a contract between the ruling family and an entity from beyond our universe. Henry Lamb is caught up in this war after his grandfather, an agent of the Directorate, is incapacitated with a vital piece of information that will win the war for whichever side gets it first.

The Domino Men is Jonathan Barnes' follow-on to The Somnambulist - not so much a sequel as another book set in the same universe, although a slight bit of carry-over from one book to the next will be noticed by those who've read the earlier work. The Somnambulist was good; The Domino Men is better. Barnes has improved his story pacing, and the narrative technique he uses in The Domino Men works quite well. I got a chance to read this one in a single sitting, and it's a good thing because I may not have been able to put it down otherwise! ( )