Tom Holt (aka, K. J. Parker) works the same side of the magical comedy street that Terry Pratchett did. Several cases at the commercial sorcerers firm of Dawson, Ahriman, and Dawson converge as a deadly asteroid is heading for the Earth in an Extinction Event when it hits.

“When Mr. Teasdale was a young junior trainee at JWW, one of the first jobs he’d been given was tidying up the firms main archive and storage area, generally referred to by the partners as the Abyss and the junior staff as the Caves of Khazard-Dum…. The Abyss certainly provided him with [challenges] but he survived, his left arm grew back eventually and he learned several valuable lessons about self-reliance, ingenuity, and never turning your back on a thermal binder.” (p. 20-21)

Mr. Teasdale has a good heart and is willing to help clients who can’t pay the high rates at Dawson, Ahriman, and Dawson for free. But, Teasdale has a conniving ex-wife named Consuela who works for a rival firm but always has her own ambitious agenda. Despite the imminent Apocalypse, Consuela tricks Mr. Teasdale into revealing a potential magical discovery that would give her a magical university professorship.

“Mr. Dawson was a man of many talents. He could turn water into Chablis and policemen into terrapins. He could wind back the clock, transmute base metal into government bonds, summon spirits form the vasty deep, pull a rabbit out of a hat, conjure up tempests, raise the dead, restore lost youth and adjust the fabric of reality so that his Rolls Royce River Ghost counted as an agricultural vehicle for tax purposes.” (p. 148-149)

Along with Dawson, Mr. Sunshine, Gina, Tiamat the Destroyer, and the shape-shifting Tony Bateman and a cast of quirky characters propel the plot in various surprising directions.If you’re in the mood for some wacky Christmas fun, take a ride with the eight Reindeer of the Apocalypse! GRADE: B+