Guards! Guards!

Fans will know the story by heart. Alcoholic Vimes, corpulent coward Sergeant Colon and barely human runt Nobby are joined by the huge, innocent new Watch recruit Carrot (a dwarf by adoption), as Ankh-Morpork city enters a reign of terror. There's a ravaging dragon about, whose flame doesn't just toast people but vaporises them. Behind the dragon are its summoners, those hilariously seedy ritualists the Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night. Behind the Brethren... but that would be telling.

Guards! Guards! is a substantial novel with a serpentine plot; boiling it down to 122 pages of speech balloons and glossy colour art must have been daunting. Some favourite Pratchett lines and running gags were thrown to the wolves, but the streamlined story still works well, and Higgins' quirky artwork adds a new dimension. Wickedly funny details lurk in street and crowd scene backgrounds. Eccentrics like Lady Sybil Ramkin, the "statueskew" dragon breeder, would be easy to turn into caricatures but are given a proper comic dignity.

A highly enjoyable read--but funnier if you know the original, where Pratchett had room to give his characters more depth. --David Langford