As the title suggests, this volume brings together nine stories by Matthew Hughes about his character Henghis Hapthorn, the foremost freelance discriminator on Old Earth in the era before Jack Vance’s Dying Earth is set; six of these stories were originally published in F&SF and the other three are original to this collection. The great conceit of these stories is the idea that every few millennia, the order of the Universe switches from being scientific and rational to being magical and intuitive; Hapthorn’s great tragedy is to be hyper-rational in a time when this change is taking place. Fortunately for him, he has a sort of shadow-self, a part of his brain that he thinks of as lurking toward the back of his mind, which periodically can be accessed by his forebrain and which is capable of making intuitive leaps that invariably lead to the solution that he is seeking. There are a couple of other recurring characters, including a demon from another dimension and an integrator (in rational world, an AI type being; in magical world, a familiar). I myself prefer Mr. Hughes’s Baldemar the Henchman and Raffalon the Thief tales to Hapthorn’s, just because I like those characters more, but the stories here are very inventive and full of sly humour as well; recommended! ( )