Repairman Jack is back!! F. Paul Wilson has inserted written a story, which takes place after Ground Zero (Book 13) and Fatal Error (Book 14.) Set in the week before Christmas, Jack is feeling sorry for himself , following the deaths of his father and brother the previous year. When an old acquaintance suggests a job tracing a missing person, he is reluctant, but concludes it may help him out of his funk. However, the clients are not being honest about who/what he is hunting. Meanwhile, a mysterious woman asks him to safeguard a priceless object from a rival collector, whose thugs will stop at nothing to get it from her. It was great to see Jack's moral compass still points north, and that he will always do the right thing. ( )

Reading this reminds me how much I love this series. I'm gonna have to read it again. ( )

I was super excited to discover a new Repairman Jack novel, and I was ecstatic to discover it's just as fantastic as the rest of the series. The characters I grew to love over the course of more than a dozen novels are here and Jack's fixes are as satisfying as ever.

There are two things that keep me from rating The Last Christmas five stars: first, and I'll admit this is a little nit-picky, it seems to take place around 2019 while the rest of the series seems to be set about a decade earlier. Time has always been a little wonky in the series, but it really stands out here.

My second reservation is that it can't quite decide if it's a stand-alone entry or not. While it doesn't focus so much on the Adversary and the ongoing cosmic battle that are central to the later books, which should make it work as a stand-alone, The Last Christmas contains many references to and major spoilers for the earlier books.

On the whole, I greatly enjoyed this one and do recommend it to fans of Repairman Jack, even though I wouldn't suggest it as a good place to start the series.

Received via NetGalley. ( )