I spent the first half of The Rook kind of disliking the main character and general tone. Everything was just a little too tongue-in-cheek for me, and O'Malley seemed to be over-borrowing from the likes of Warren Ellis and Grant Morrison (strange that that should bother me, since I'm quite the fan of both of them). Then somewhere around the middle of the book, when the plot really started to move, my opinion completely changed, and I began to devour it.

Ultimately, it lived up to its promise; a fun, occasionally humorous read complete with supernatural secret agents and screaming Belgians in fishtanks of ooze.