The Bureau of Good and Evil

Night Watch, Sergei Lukyanenko. This seems to me stereotypically Russian: one half fairytale, one half bureaucracy. You see, there are the forces of Good (the Light Ones) and there are the forces of Evil (the Dark Ones) and they're locked in an epic struggle. Exciting, right? Well, kind of. It turns out that there's a centuries-old truce between Light and Dark, and this is really the story of the Night Watch, the Light Ones in charge of enforcing the truce. (There's also a Day Watch consisting of the Night Watch's opposite number among the Dark Ones.)

I go back and forth about this book and its sequel, Day Watch, which I'm reading right now. On the one hand, reading about treaties, it turns out, is pretty unexciting (unless we're talking about the s!@# that went down at Yalta, of course). Plus the books' episodic structure tends to draw suspense away. But what the books have going for them is Lukyanenko's psychological and philosophical insight. The central, seemingly doomed love story between IT guy/magician Anton and Svetlana, the much more powerful witch he loves is worth all the talk about "fifth level infractions" and the rest of it. -- Pete