Alisa is a young witch in the employ of the Day Watch, an allegedly evil organization whose mandate is protecting the Others' rights. Trumpeting a belief in the law of the jungle, it is the Day Watch that licenses vampires to hunt for blood, for example, and ensures that evil magicians have leeway to exploit humans for financial gain. Opposing the Day Watch is the Night Watch, whose members are devoted to protecting humankind. Under the terms of an ancient agreement, every good magical act on the part of a Night Watch agent—every healing, rescue or stroke of good luck—entitles the Day Watch to perform an equivalent bad deed. Meanwhile a third force, the Inquisition, monitors the balance.

Alisa's mystical power reserve is exhausted in a battle with the Moscow Night Watch, and her boss sends her to a children's summer camp to recover. The gathering of adolescents is a perfect venue for convalescence. Alisa is nourished by the children's various anxieties and fears, and speeds her revival further by telling them campfire story so disturbing the girls have nightmares, which she has been able to devour. Unfortunately, the camp presents an unexpected distraction in the form of Igor, a sexy and sensitive boys' camp counselor. Suddenly Alisa finds herself in a new kind of peril: the danger of falling in love with someone who is merely human, and therefore forbidden.

Great powers play dice with human lives

The core of Day Watch is the question of romantic love, just as it was in Night Watch, but in this second novel the permutations are more subdued. In Day Watch, Lukyanenko moves his focus from the heroic Anton and his beloved Sveta, shining the spotlight on a morally flexible Day Watch agent, Edgar. As the consequences of Aliya's doomed romance ensnare magicians on both sides of the Light/Dark divide, Edgar sees an intricate plot taking shape. It is soon clear that his life may depend on understanding the conspiracy before it unfolds.

Lukyanenko does a masterful job of building suspense, using the tools of any supernatural mystery: clues, clashes, misdirection and some hilarious red herrings. However, the magical rules of the Others' universe are so arbitrary that it is nigh impossible to work out what Edgar's superiors are up to. All a reader can do is enjoy the ride and wait for the author to reveal his ultimate purpose—a potentially frustrating outcome for those who prefer to work out mysteries themselves. Even so, the journey is not without its satisfactions: The characterization is excellent, and the richness of the book's Eastern European setting and its take on post-Communist life give it a vivid sense of the unfamiliar.

Though the action moves from Moscow to Prague, the book's critical scenes take place in the Twilight, a shadowy realm where magicians communicate through language barriers and pass through locked doors, where battles are fought and the souls of defeated Others are devoured. In a book whose villains claim to be the champions of freedom and whose heroes are—more often than not—the ones hatching potentially apocalyptic plots, the gray of Twilight makes a perfect symbol for the ethical ambiguities that abound in Lukyanenko's universe.

With one book left in this series and a last significant faction—the Inquisition—left to explore, this high-stakes game of magical chess and all its pieces have been beautifully set up, in Day Watch, for what promises to be a riveting endgame.