By Denise Mina & Leonardo Manco Green (Vertigo)
ISBN 1-84576-568-0
Continuing the epic saga begun in Empathy is The Enemy (ISBN 1-84576-382-3) (see previous review) Denise Mina and Leonardo Manco complete the horrendous storm of events created when a Christian sect accidentally contact an entity that abides in a third spiritual space neither Heaven nor Hell.
A plague of Empathy has infected Glasgow, and ordinary mortals cannot survive other people’s pain. An epidemic of suicides results in the quarantining of the city, but the soldiers policing the cordon will soon be the first new victims as the effect of the mystical Empathy Engine begin to spread.
Degenerate and dissolute trickster magician John Constantine and his dwindling band of resistors are trapped in the city, desperately striving to fix the problem before it goes global, but their resources, and time itself is running out…
Mina and Manco crafted a moody and awesomely daunting premise and carried it to a brilliant conclusion. That they fittingly end it all with an ideal solution that manages to be the wickedly last word in the centuries old rivalry between the Scots and the English is an absolute comedy masterstroke. In a long and varied career, John Constantine has seldom been better.
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