Book Review: Skulduggery Pleasant By Derek Landy
A skeleton detective and a young girl walk into a bar. They beat up a few people, save the world, and so much more...
Welcome to my cozy little corner of the internet!
Looking for a star rating? Check them out on my Goodreads or StoryGraph.
Warning: This review does contain spoilers for A Mind Full of Murder
Re-reading childhood favorites is one of my favorite activities as a reader. I don’t do it nearly as often as I would like to. I hope that 2025 is the year of re-reads but we will see. At the beginning of December I decided it was finally time to pick up my all time favorite series: Skulduggery Pleasant by Derek Landy. This series was my drug when I was in high school. I absolutely adored the main character, a skeleton detective named Skulduggery Pleasant, and his partner Valkyrie Cain. The world is full of magic, emotion, humor, action, and so much more. I used to tell myself if there was ever a fire, those books would be the first thing I would grab on my way out of the building. This was obviously disregarding the fact that there were 9 books and it was incredibly unlikely that I would be going anywhere without dropping them everywhere if there were actually going to be a fire.
If you are as deeply involved in the world of Skulduggery Pleasant as I am, you know that Derek keeps releasing more books. Last I checked the total number of books was 17. I stopped reading the series in 2020 at book 13 after being overwhelmed by college and the world. It took me four years to get back into it. The only thing I regret is that I didn’t do it sooner.
Derek Landy does an amazing job of building a world of magic and wonder. The characters are diverse, deep, and addicting. The humor is on point and relatable and there is an endless amount of action to be had. The adventures range from saving the world from the typical bad guy to fighting gods in an alternate dimension. All the while you get to watch Skulduggery and Valkyrie’s relationship grow and see how the magic, the trauma, and the people all impacted her as a character.
While Landy’s world is amazing, I find myself telling people that I read the series for the characters. When I first read this, it was an ARC copy that I had won from the public library reading program. I fell head over heels in love with Skulduggery from my first read-through at the age of 12. My pre-teen mind imagined this character swooping in to save the day and protect me from the horrors of my true reality. This never happened, but the story gave me the escape I so desperately needed. I read and re-read the series any chance that I could. It was the only time that I felt any sort of emotion. I cannot describe how thankful I am for having this series during that time.
I collected the rest of the series as it came out. Slowly filling my shelves with the stories. I loved it. I carried them with me to college, where they sat on my dorm shelf and collected dust as I dived head-first into my studies and new community. I left the series behind as I started to make friends and find people who cared and supported me. I discovered individuals who shared moments with me just like Skulduggery and Valkyrie. I had a support team that I felt cared for me as deeply as Skulduggery cared about Valkyrie. I found my Ghastly and held onto them for dear life. It truly felt like instead of choosing to continue with the adventure I decided to step away, back to my mortal life, and I was content.
Every time I hit another rough patch, the depression starts to sneak back into my life, the pain of the past hurts, and the trauma rearing its ugly head, I find myself reaching for this series. Staring at the books on my shelf and questioning whether it’s worth going to work or to get lost in a story I call home.
Having just finished my most recent re-read of the series and finally catching up on the three books that I hadn’t read yet I figured it was time to share my thoughts on the series as a whole. Derek Landy writes Skulduggery Pleasant for Young Adult audiences. This is obvious in the first three books of the series as we get to learn more about the magical side of the world and see Skulduggery and Valkyrie grow together as partners in crime. As the series progresses the stakes grow higher and they handle even more world-ending and mind-bending situations than the previous book. While it is a repetitive formula that Derek uses, it’s a solid and trustworthy one. By the end of the first age - books one through nine, we see Valkyrie to adulthood, through her surge, and completely and utterly shattered.
In the second phase – books 10 through 15, we get introduced to new characters and fall back in step with the original ones. The second phase focuses on Valkyrie’s recovery and learning how to overcome the horrors of the previous nine books that she’s lived through. Her friendships and her relationships are deeper, the stakes are even higher, and the world ends. The second phase is the first time we get to see Valkyrie and Skulduggery fail at saving the world and it’s a nice change. The infallible detectives are capable of making mistakes just like the best of us.
In Phase three, Landy changes his whole process. Unlike the rest of the series, A Mind Full of Murder feels very much like a traditional detective novel. It’s more gruesome than the rest of the series, and is arguably no longer in the Young Adult category. One of the things that bugged me
was Skulduggery. He has always been obsessed with his own intelligence, but A Mind Full of Murder seemed to present it in ways that weren’t fully fleshed out. His intelligence was used as a way to make Valkyrie uncertain about herself and there was a lot of the book she spent questioning herself because she wasn’t as “smart” as Skulduggery. I could see where Landy was going with it but It
fell short in the end. These characters have both gone through too much at this point to be insecure about a simple thing as intelligence. Especially when there was so much else in this book proving how much Valkyrie and Skulduggery meant to each other.
“Everyone who knows about you, everyone who’s ever heard about the things you’ve done, would all agree on one thing: you value each other more than anyone else. What is that thing you say?... Until the end. Skulduggery Pleasant and Valkyrie Cain, together against the world.”
This book seemed intent on making their relationship be tested in ways it hasn’t before and while they both came out at the end It was a completely different reading experience than the other books. Valkyrie’s relationship with her sister was also awkward and kind of painful to watch. I hope to see it develop differently as phase three continues, but it hurts my heart to see it after all that has happened with Valkyrie and Alice.
I hope that this article inspires you to pick up the series and check it out. If not, I hope that you have found something that has supported you in the ways this series supported me. As always, thanks for reading!