Wizard Squared
Rogue Agent – Book III

By K E Mills

        Hapless Gerald Dunwoody and his friends at Witches, Incorporated are back for a third (mis)adventure.  This time a visitor arrives from another dimension, a place where things are very wrong indeed.  Apparently this is all the fault of a certain Gerald Dunwoody, or rather because he turned left instead of right in the other reality when he should not have done.  Because of this, a magical war is raging and, of course, the only person to stop it is perhaps the person who started it – Gerald Dunwoody.
 
Having the usual bumbling-but-good Gerald come up against his evil parallel self is a fun but unoriginal concept made interesting by the depth and breadth of Ms Mills’s setting.  One bonus of having a trilogy composed of fat books is that, in the right hands, there is enough time and room for plenty of world building, and this is something that this author (aka Karen Miller) does rather well.  What holds the book up (as it did the other two) is the endless bickering between the characters that is presumably supposed to provide comic relief, but actually holds up the action and becomes tedious quickly.  As soon as this stops, the story takes wings and flies merrily off, and readers can eagerly anticipate the big showdown between the two Geralds, among other things.  There are not many authors who can do comic fantasy well – actually only Terry Pratchett and Tom Holt come to mind – but Ms Mills makes more than a good fist of it in this lively trilogy.