The third book in the Preacher series is a tale of daring rescue, topped and tailed with more history to flesh out the background. The flashbacks take us to Vietnam, with a friend of Custer’s father explaining where the violent but righteous side of Custer’s character comes from. At the end, we’re given a brief history of vampire chum Cassidy.
Between this is the body count we’ve come to expect, tied in with a bit of high adventure. Custer enters the Grail, the organisation that he’s come to see as the antithesis of everything he believes in. Chuck in cameos from the Saint of Killers and God himself, and you’ve got the potential for a myriad of mayhem.
This volume moves the story on a tad, though it doesn’t attempt to do anything more. There’s less of the emotion that characterises the previous volumes – by now it’s almost presumed that we’re interested enough in the characters for their own sake without the requirements of any subtexts to get in the way of the violence. As a result, the action-packed core of this volume leaves little room for much else.
Because of this it seems a bit workaday in places. Although you wouldn’t want to miss it if you’re collecting the series, it isn’t the best volume of the set, doing little more than thrashing out some background detail and taking one more step towards the inevitable showdown.
