Preposterous plot and ridiculous character names are the hallmark of this novel which reads like an escapee of a Boy's Own magazine. 

The villains are mentally unstable super-villains with unlimited funds intent on world destruction in recompense for childhood traumas. The hero regularly escapes death without anyone really been completely sure of how that happened. Gatiss being who he is, the story is given a dash of unexpected queerness in Box's bisexuality, but that is sadly undermine by several instances of what suspiciously reads like transphobia. There is also a gratuitously mean streak that pervades Gatiss' writing and surfaces of incongruous choices of disparaging adjectives when describing situations or people. Even Box, who is supposed to be some sort of free-thinking libertine, isn't free of regular and apparently unconscious choices of judgmental vocabulary. 

The book is infused with a swash-buckling wit meant to convey the hero's dashing laissez-faire attitude to life. When described as "The fêted artist, the dashing dandy. But by night - philanderer, sodomite and assassin!" his response, as a stage whisper to the reader, is: "As a thumbnail sketch of me that wasn't half bad." (p238) 

But all that wit doesn't always hit the mark and the whole book reads like an unpolished draft, a slap-dash attempt at something that could have been really good fun, had it been given a little more care and consideration. For something written in 2004 by a gay man, this is uncomfortably un-PC, and is perhaps best forgotten. I hope the rest of the series is better but I don't intend to find out.