Though written with a light and lively flair, this book falls apart with its weak plotting and characters, further hampered with needless post-modern perspective shifts between multiple narrators, all equally dreary and confusing to discern. When the book reveals its nifty premise within the first pages of its hero's fistfight with the Devil, reaching that showdown becomes incredibly tedious. The book's largest is its inability to commit to developing any of its multiple narrator's subplots as plots, as the big fight quickly becomes backdrop to explore the inner workings of London's lower class struggling with romance and redemption. The hero himself Daniel O'Thunder starts off as an intriguing juggernaut of heroicism and morality, but is soon exposed as one of the most one-dimensional entities in all of literature, a broken record of Christian kindness. So while the book is written quite skillfully with a keen ear for the times' style and dialog, the story is just one long, meandering slog to a brief, disappointing and cliche finale. ( )