Barnaby Grimes: Legion of the Dead
by Chris Riddell & Paul Stewart

Release Date: 3rd Jul 2008
Publisher: Doubleday
ISBN: 978 0 3856 1193 0
RRP: £8.99

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Barnaby Grimes, tick-tock lad, highstacker and delivery boy is back with a new adventure...

Equally as random and slightly more far-fetched as The Return of the Emerald Skull, Legion of the Dead offers excitement and adventure for boys who love using their imagination and in doing so - do not limit themselves in their reading matter.

In Legion of the Dead, Barnaby finds himself unwittingly caught up in a foreboding tale that stretches back several decades in the lives of some of the inhabitants of his beloved city. His friend, Professor Pinkerton-Barnes, invites Barnaby to participate in an unusual underwater expedition to discover some sea life that he believes has been killing off the fish in the harbour - but Grimes comes face to face with a manevolent creature and in his attempts to save himself, he ends up being carried away from the professor and landing near to the eerie Adelaide Graveyard, where he witnesses what he initially believed to be a hallucination - as the ground gave up its recently deceased and buried 'Firejaw o'Rourke' right in front of him! Inevitably, Barnaby wants to get to the bottom of the incident - and so begins to unravel the mysterious recent grave raiding events that have rocked the city and discovers a strange and dastardly deed carried out many years previously that seem to have come back to haunt its perpetrator.

With the occasional unusual terminology and a breadth of vocabulary that will stretch even the most advanced reader in this age group - the story still manages to tumble along with considerable pace and a growing sense of urgency. Despite this, I didn't enjoy Legion of the Dead as much as The Return of the Emerald Skull. Perhaps because the plotline was already familiar, perhaps because the story itself seemed dispossessed of any real sticking power - whatever the reasons, I hope that the next Barnaby Grimes proves that Riddell and Stewart are still capable of producing winning children's fiction.