Barnaby Grimes: Legion of the Dead

Well established as a reliable rooftop-leaping Tick-Tock lad, Barnaby Grimes services are sought by all in his unnamed gothic city. Grimes' delivery career leaves scarce time for other matters, but circumstances are often not as we choose as Barnaby discovers when his attentions are distracted by Lucy Partleby, a beautiful young nurse and quickly the object of Grimes' affections. Also taking Grimes' thinly-spread time is Will Farmer, an inexperienced Tick-Tock Lad whom Grimes' adopts as a pupil and friend, instructing him in the ways of 'high stacking'.

When Grimes is sent by the ever-present Professor Pinkerton-Barnes on a delivery errand on the night of the funeral of master criminal Firejaw O'Rourke, Barnaby does not hesitate to take the assignment seeing it as another opportunity to catch the eye of the on-looking Nurse Partleby as he expertly executes leaps and bounds atop the city skyline. The funeral party of rival gangs paying respects to O'Rourke forces Barnaby through the cities vast cemetery, where Grimes' soon discovers the grave does not suit the dead cutthroat O'Rourke as his and scores of other undead bodies rise from there eternal unrest to encircle the nimble courier.

Legion of the Dead is again narrated by a warmly reminiscing older Grimes and broadens the gothic Georgian cityscape of the earlier books of the series, introducing several unfamiliar faces to the cast of Barnaby's bizarre tales. The descriptions of the decaying reanimated corpses of Grimes' foes are given incredible detail in both description and illustration with each intricate line drawing well deserving of a frame. Stewart and Riddell's Barnaby Grimes leaps as skilfully from the page as the character does from the cobbled streets to peaks of his fantastical town.