Chosen by way of a comedy interlude between two serious works, I actually have no memory of acquiring this book although I suspect it was part of a job lot of second hand fantasy novels I bought in the early 2000’s most of which have been read and passed on to other people who might be interested. This is the only book by Tom Holt I own, although he has written over seventy novels along with numerous novellas and short stories in his own name and that of K J Parker since giving up his original job as a solicitor in Somerset. As I have probably owned this book for a couple of decades it seems only right to finally read it especially when I read the back cover and it sounds intriguing…

To my surprise this retelling of the George and the dragon story is largely set in modern day Birmingham (England not USA). The local council has commissioned renowned sculptor Bianca Wilson to create a grand statue for the square outside the town hall and much to her amazement she finds herself selecting George and the dragon as the subject, very different to previous works of hers. It’s as though she is being led into the subject, and that’s because she probably is. One of the main premises of the book is that it is possible for the dead to inhabit a statue and effectively come alive again with the statue returning to flesh and blood when it is possessed. The first inkling that Bianca gets that something is amiss is when she and her friend Mike arrive in her studio one morning and on the plinth is just St George, several tonnes of Carrara marble in the shape of a dragon has vanished overnight with no trace of the mechanical equipment that would have been needed to cut it from the plinth or lift it onto presumably a flat bed lorry. Even more oddly the next day the dragon is back and George goes missing and there is a bit of toing and froing over the following days before both statues disappear. In the meantime we are introduced to some more protagonists, to wit five demons that got left behind in the Cotswolds region of England on their way on holiday from Hell to a country music event in Nashville.

I really enjoyed the interplay between the demons, one of which is female and is attracted to the effective leader of the stragglers much to his obvious concern and the situations they get into when they get recruited by St George to help him win the big rematch with the dragon, because who says the saint has to be the good guy after all? The other main characters include Chubby who makes his money selling time to people who need it along with his worryingly sentient computer and Kurt, a professional hit-man who may or may not be dead already. Holt manages to keep the various sub-plots moving at a rapid pace but not so that you lose track of who is doing what, where and why and I loved that the most likeable characters are the least obvious contenders for that position and that St George is clearly a nasty piece of work who apparently won the first contest with the dragon due to a fix with a gambling syndicate so you are rooting for the dragon almost from the start of the book.

I really enjoyed this book and am now surprised I haven’t any more works by Tom Holt. From the evidence of this book he seems to fall into much the same comic fantasy genre as Robert Rankin with unbelievable things happening in a fully believable modern setting.