Jack is back.

F. Paul Wilson tried to end the series, but fan interest, and possibly his own fondness for the character, keep Repairman Jack alive.

Why shouldn't fans continue to want more? The writing is first rate. The plots of the stories are bold and original. And who doesn't like to walk in the shoes of a character like Repairman Jack for a while? Jack is tough, but compassionate. He doesn't bow to the constrictions of society. He's clever, prepared, and able to take care of himself and any situation that may come his way.

On top of that, Jack might even be something more than human.

I began my relationship with Repairman Jack way back around 1985. I had read The Keep, and like everyone else, I loved it. I was living in Seattle in the middle of the eighties, and I spent a lot of time at the downtown library. They happened to have the Whispers Press edition of The Tomb in circulation, and I checked it out. The Tomb, as you should know, is the first appearance of Repairman Jack.

I was an instant F. Paul Wilson fan upon reading The Keep. After the final page of The Tomb, he was on the very short list of my favorite authors.

I continued to read everything I could get my hands on from Wilson, and I was never disappointed. It was all great, but I was ecstatic when I learned that he was bringing Jack back in 1998 with the novel, Legacies. The character had made a couple of appearances in short stories, but fans like me were waiting and hoping for a full-blown novel with Repairman Jack.

Wilson melded the Jack character with events from his other books. A cycle that began with The Keep and continued on with titles like The Touch, Reborn, Reprisal, and Nightworld. Now, starting with Legacies, Repairman Jack fans had fifteen years of books on the way.

F. Paul Wilson even did novels featuring young Jack, but he laid the character to rest after Fear City, in 2014.

Fans mourned, and it's my guess that Wilson did as well. Most of us hoped we'd see the character again, and now we have. The Last Christmas, a Repairman Jack novel, has been published as a deluxe, limited edition from Gauntlet Publications, and is now available in hardcover and trade paperback from Crossroads Press.

It's been quite a while since I read The Dark at the End, and so my memories about the Adversary Cycle have become kind of blurry. It took me a bit to reacquaint myself with the details of what was going on. I half-expected The Last Christmas to be a stand-alone Jack novel, but this book is a gift to fans of the series. This new novel exists in the time frame between Ground Zero and Fatal Error.

Once I settled in to the scheme of details of the story cycle, I began to really enjoy The Last Christmas.

By this point Repairman Jack is used to bizarre situations, but he is confronted with an especially weird case this time. A couple of loopy scientists engage him to help find and capture a wolf and man hybrid. Meanwhile a mysterious, exotic woman hires Jack to safeguard a priceless relic. Two separate, unrelated scenarios. Well, sort of. Once more Jack is a pawn in cataclysmic events with incredibly high stakes.

The Last Christmas is full of the kind of action, humor, emotion, and vivid imagination readers have come to expect from the Repairman Jack series. And, really, from anything written by Wilson. I loved the book, and I hope to see Jack in print again sometime. Like Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, F. Paul Wilson and Repairman Jack are inexorably entwined.

Written by Mark Sieber

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