Night Watch

This is one of Pratchett's best books. Although he's thought of as a comedian, it's also one of his most serious books.

His main regular hero, Samuel Vimes, is thrown back in time about thirty years, to the darker days of his own youth, when Ankh-Morpork was ruled by a paranoid tyrant and was about to rebel. It's a dangerous, almost lawless place, and this is an edgy, absorbing story, hard to put down; it won the Prometheus Award in 2003, which must have come as a bit of a surprise.

It's interesting to fill in some of the history of Ankh-Morpork and to meet various familiar characters when they were young.

I deduct a star for Pratchett's tendency to moralize, which I find a bit intrusive, and for the business with the monks, which I think could have been handled more briefly and neatly (or perhaps even completely omitted).

Terry Pratchett has a tendency, especially in his later books, to make points about morality and politics, which I think a novelist should try to make in a more inconspicuous manner. Furthermore, I have the impression that he has strong opinions about decency but lacks a well-defined ideology and morality. On the political front especially, he dodges the question by conveniently providing his modern Ankh-Morpork with a relatively benign dictator aided by a chief of police with a heart of gold (Samuel Vimes). This is a good solution only if such unlikely people manage to work their way to the top. When they die, what then?