Wendy Walker's The Secret Service is a latter-day gothic novel made more interesting than many of its progenitors by the quality, sentence for sentence, of Walker's writing. Her elegant prose is in service of a story about an English secret service whose members can assume other forms—goblets, roses, privet hedges—in order to infiltrate enemies' strongholds, strongholds that, in the best gothic tradition, are replete with secret passages, garden mazes, and towers that imprison missing princesses. All of this allows Walker to meditate fruitfully on the boundaries between the human and the not-human, boundaries we like to believe are immutable. The center section, in which one of the agents is trapped between object and human, is a tour-de-force, but so powerful (and long) is it that it overbalances, to some extent, the story that surrounds it, but it is in itself such a pleasure that one doesn't mind. It is wrong that book of this quality should be out-of-print.