Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko

When my evil twin tells me I need to go read a book, I listen, and I always find myself falling in love with yet another book! "Night Watch" is no exception and I can hardly wait to read the rest of the series! Originally written in Russian, the entire series has been translated into English for us by Andrew Bromfield. We're very fortunate that he did, Russian is a difficult language to learn, and I would be sad if I had missed out on reading this book because of that!

"Night Watch" begins a dark saga that pits the classic good versus evil, but with a twist. In this world there are what they call the "Others," people who can operate in the Twilight of the world, and these others are divided into agents of the Light and agents of the Dark. The agents of the Light form the Night Watch and it is their charge to keep an eye on the agents of the Dark during the night and make sure they don't cross any boundaries.

Now you're probably nodding along and going, "uh huh, I don't see anything strange about that." Well, the part that might throw you is that the agents of the Dark form what's called the Day Watch and their job is to make sure, during the day light, that the agents of the Light don't overstep their boundaries.

"Wait a second," you're probably thinking, "how can the good guys overstep their bounds?" Well, it's actually rather easy when you find out that the agents of the light and the agents of the dark formed and agreement years ago to prevent themselves from killing the world with their wars. Now each is allowed a certain amount of activity, but everything must be kept in balance, every good act means an equal bad act is allowable and so forth.

For many on the watch this is all part of the job, and they go about it without too much thought. When a mid-level agent named Anton finds himself pulled into the struggles for power and the intrigues surrounding them, he also finds himself questioning how the entire system works and the very nature of good and evil themselves.