Review by Ian Keogh

November is the story of how three women connect in a single night in a never named city while chaos occurs all around and turns their lives upside down. Matt Fraction rations revelations and connections, so the series of events related in The Girl on the Roof made little sense in isolation. The Gun in the Puddle, though, begins the process of joining the dots.

The opening volume showed how the gun in the title was found by a woman here named as Emma-Rose as she walked home in the rain with a bag of groceries. She called it in to the police, who duly arrived, grabbed her, tied her up and threw her in their car boot. A glimpse at her youth opens this volume, before a switch to her awakening in the back of the car. Before the volume ends, we discover where the gun originated, in the short term at least, and how it ended up in the puddle.

As before, the art is magnificent, delivering desperation, personality, action, danger and atrocity. The synthesis of Elsa Charretier’s accomplished scene-setting and Matt Hollingsworth’s understated colours is a thing of beauty despite illustrating violence and atrocity, and the detail is to be admired as Charretier switches from one location to the next.

For the curious who’ve stuck with November after the first volume’s elusive content, there’s no great reward in story terms. More events are seen, presumably connected to what’s already known, and before the end two of three featured women appear to have met, although in life-threatening circumstances. Anyone who loves a mystery, though, will be hooked and panting for The Voice on the End of the Phone.