Some books are intense, thoughtful experiences that force you to reflect upon the world around you, maybe even questioning the way you live your life.

Others are just damn good fun.

Mark Gatiss, the tall one from The League of Gentlemen, is rather annoyingly talented, and his latest book The Devil in Amber has just been published by Simon & Schuster. It definitely falls into the latter category.

It's the second in the Lucifer Box series, detailing the exploits of a wonderfully morally ambivalent secret agent, like a rather tasty fusion of James Bond and Oscar Wilde. Box is beginning to feel his age (though never looking anything less than dashing), and finds himself up against a fascist mastermind hell-bent on raising the devil.

As Stephen Fry says in the blurb: "Delicious, depraved, inventive, macabre and hilarious... more, I want more!"

Check it out. And while you're at it, check out the first in the series too - The Vesuvius Club.