Silver Volume 4
Stephan Franck, writer & illustrator
Dark Planet Comics, 2018
The final volume in Franck's noir vampire caper sees the con completed. It's a complex story involving double-crosses, unexpected meetings, and some esoteric vampire lore (involving swapping one country's soil for another, as well as ghost Old Ones who the vampire king invokes to bodily move his castle to a new location). Like all great cons, the mark is unaware of the full scope of the con, and even participates in his own downfall in the end. SPOILER ALERT! The rest of my review goes unavoidably into some surprise plot points.
So complex it's a bit hard to follow: at some point I intend to go back and reread the whole series. But the big irony is that just as the con was about to fail--as the team had the treasure on the getaway train, but was overtaken by the vampire king and his soldiers on horseback--the whole thing is resolved by the Chinese military, who swoop in to route the vampires and seize the treasure (which was Chinese to start with). This turns out to be the crew's plan all along, including cutting Finnigan out of it. The series was so carefully plotted that I suspect there were clues about this earlier which I missed.
Back in New York, Finnigan receives an invitation to fly to France. He reunites with Sledge (aka Rosalyn) and the Chinese boy Tao (the one who can see the future). In her last vampire battle on the train, Rosalyn discovered that her sister Bernice--whose capture by a group of vampires was what started her on her vampire-hunting path--is alive. So the trio goes off to find her. In his Afterward Franck reveals that this plot twist came as a surprise to him as well, and that there will be more Silver after all. This volume is the end of the caper, but not the end of the line for all of the characters. It will be interesting to see what they get up to.
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