By Sergei Lukyanenko.
There are humans, and there are Others. Others are the magically inclined folks of the world, the ones who can see and access the Twilight, a gray in-between magical world. Some folks are magicians and witches, others are vampires and shsapeshifters. There's the Light side, and the Dark side. Light side folks care about the welfare of others, Dark folks prioritize themselves. It's a tale and battle as old as time.
However, both sides are at a truce right now. What that means is that nobody battles, and everybody keeps tabs on each other. The Light Ones have a "Night Watch" that keeps track of what the Dark Ones do, and the Dark Ones have a "Day Watch" that keeps track of the Light's actions. If a Light One gives a slight magical bonus to someone, it means that a Dark One can do the opposite on their end. Any advantage or action must have an equal action happen in return. It's a total stalemate and not like joining the Jedi Knights. What kind of magical world is this, anyway? It's certainly not a fun one.
The narrator of our story, Anton, is a midlevel magician/programmer working for the Moscow Night Watch in 1998. Usually he's not the guy sent out for field ops, but in this book, he ends up doing more of them than he'd like. There are three stories in this book, featuring Anton, his partner Olga, a newly discovered Other teenager named Egon who refuses to choose a side (but leans toward the Dark anyway), and Svetlana, who I'll finish mentioning below the spoiler cut.*
In the first section, Anton comes across Egon and rescues him from a couple of vampires, and comes across Svetlana in the subway. She's got a super nasty black vortex curse on her that will not only kill her, but take out hundreds or thousands of people around her. Anton is caught between two cases--the case of the vampire he killed and the one still after Egon, and trying to save Svetlana, or at least the people who will also die around her. Anton turns out to have the ability to lighten Svetlana's curse by just talking to her...but who put the curse on such a good woman, and how can the Night Watch get that person to call it off?
In the second section, there's an undiscovered Light One going around killing off whatever Dark Ones he accidentally stumbles across on the street. There's four possible suspects as to who did it...and Anton is the only reasonably plausible one who could have done it. Except he didn't. Uh-oh. Anton and his partner Olga do a body swap to try to thwart the framers, but when that goes to hell, Anton's forced to figure out why he's being used as bait in this scenario and what endgame the higher-ups are going for.
In the third section, almost the entire Night Watch is given three days off of vacation, but Anton can't enjoy it so much. He keeps wondering why this is, and what kind of scheming is being directed towards his girlfriend to accelerate her magical development. Nobody will tell him what they have in store for her, but from what he can figure out, it won't end well. And when the head of the Day Watch shows up at his house feeling the same way...well, what third option is there to take now?
There's a lot of secret scheming and gambits going on in this book, and Anton becomes a pro at taking a third option when faced with a bunch of predicted shitty choices.. I am not 100% sure that I quite understood all of the gambiting going on, but I think I almost did, so that might be good enough. And despite the world building being of a more depressing nature than I prefer--then again, this is a Russian novel and we all know how those go--I kept on reading this book and wanted to know what was going on with the characters. And the rest of the series. Go figure. I didn't think I'd like it, but when two friends were really into it, I caved in. And now I'll be checking out book 2.
Four stars.
Spoiler space
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*... who Anton later becomes involved with. Except Svetlana has a Great Destiny and Great Career ahead of her...which means naturally someday she'll leave Anton in the dust. Kinda sucks to have precognitive, hundreds-of-years-old boss-types telling you your relationship is inevitable and inevitably doomed, and you're forever only going to be a middle level sort of fellow. Poor suckers.
I do think the development of Svetlana--and Egon too, really--is done well. There's all these schemes going on to force Svetlana to develop in a certain way on both ends--to speed up her development into a Great Sorceress, and to force her into a method to turn humans into better humans. Which as we can tell from history (or later, from watching the Serenity movie), doesn't seem to work. And given that Olga already tried this and suffered punishment for a long-ass time for it, makes you wonder if they shouldn't have dropped the idea by now. Sure, nobody enjoys a stalemate, but...And then it turns out to be some kind of gambit all along too. Go figure.
Yes, the gambitting gets confusing.
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