With The Chosen Seed, Sarah Pinborough brings the Dog Faced Gods trilogy to a spectacular and suitably apocalyptic finale.

First his nephew was kidnapped, now DI Cass Jones has been framed for murder. But he’s about to get help from a very unexpected source. Detectives Hask and Ramsey are searching for the killer behind the lethal virus sweeping through London, which has thrown up clues that Cass might be innocent after all.

Somehow it’s linked to Mr Bright, and to the organisation which manipulates everyone from the shadows. So Cass Jones is going up against The Bank and it’s sinister employees one last time. He needs every ally he can get, and this time he means to find answers. And the more he learns, the more everything hinges on finding Luke…

Although Cass Jones is still the central character and the plot is largely driven by his attempt to locate Luke, his missing nephew, this installment of the trilogy is much more about the origins and motivations of Mr Bright and the organisation he leads. As such the fantasy elements come right to the fore this time around.

It’s not hard to see where things are going and the ending is not a huge surprise. What makes the novel stand out, for me, is the strength of the plotting and seeing how Sarah Pinborough deftly pulls together the various threads into a narrative that keeps you hooked right up to the end.

The attention to detail applies not only to the plot but also the characters, with every one of them fully rounded and each of them displaying a set of motivations that are fully consistent with both the setting and the events.

As with The Shadow of the Soul, the events in The Chosen Seed follow directly from the previous novel with no time taken to recap the earlier events. As such, you really need to have read the first two novels before embarking on this one.

The books are all well worth your time, though, as The Chosen Seed makes for a powerful ending to an excellent trilogy that has, throughout, been both gripping and thoughtful.

Somewhere around three-quarters the way through this book, I found myself thinking that there was no way that Sarah Pinborough could possibly wrap up all of the various plot threads before the end of the novel and that this second book of the trilogy would end up doing little more than set the scene for the final instalment.

How wrong I was.

There is a lot going on in here but Sarah Pinborough does a superb job of bringing everything together in a manner that brings together the various threads without feeling rushed of leaving too much dangling.

DI Cass Jones is still dealing with the fallout of uncovering a major conspiracy within his own police station when a terrorist attack rocks London and he finds himself called on to help with the investigation. At the same time he has his own investigation to worry about: young people are dying, apparently committing suicide – and they’re all linked by the phrase Chaos in the Darkness, scrawled or sent as their last message to the world.

Then he’s given a note from his dead brother Christian, written before his murder: the three words – ‘They took Luke’ – opens up a whole new can of worms, because Cass knows immediately who They are: Mr Bright and the shadowy Network. His dead brother has set him a task from beyond the grave – to find the baby, his nephew, stolen at birth.

And as Cass tries to divide his time between all three investigations, it’s not long before he discovers links, where there should not be. The mysterious Mr Bright is once again pulling his strings, and there’s nothing DI Cass Jones hates more…

A Shadow of the Soul is the middle book of a trilogy and you do need to have read the first book, A Matter of Blood, to properly understand what is going on. In A Matter of Blood, we were introduced to a near-future dystopia with hints of supernatural horror. A Shadow of the Soul retains the police procedural structure of the previous book but, now that the supernatural element has been revealed, takes the time to delve further into the motivations and methods of the beings of The Network.

We have conspiracies within conspiracies within conspiracies as the central character, Cass Jones (a wonderfully, and believably, miserable individual), attempts to make sense of what is going on around and to him.

While this is the middle book of a trilogy, it also stands up on its own merits as a well contained story. If the series stopped here, I would be reasonably happy but there is a third entry and I shall be reading this very shortly.