The story in that book told how Timmy was persuaded to travel to the Free Country, which was part of a big Vertigo Comics crossover event in the early 90s.
This book follows the Dead Boy Detectives as they investigate the disappearance of an entire village worth of children. As well as this village of missing children, all the children of power are being kidnapped from our world too. there is a dastardly plan in action and only the two dead children have any inkling that anything untoward is happening.
Eventually they cross paths with Tim and all the plotlines are resolved satisfactorily.
There are a whole host of writers and artists in the mix here. Surprisingly it still makes for a coherent and consistent experience, both in terms of artwork and writing.
This is partly due to some story tinkering that Gaiman talks about in the introduction. We don't get the full details of all the kidnappings, or indeed three of the children of power being returned to the real world. these were details that were fleshed out in the individual issues of the assorted comics at the time. It seems a shame that more of those details weren't incorporated here, but I suppose pages were limited. there is still a feeling of incompleteness left behind though.
What remains of the story (including a new middle section, written specifically for this volume) is still very good and thought provoking. There are some disturbing concepts flying around and the identity of the true villain surprised me, even though it was more than signposted from fairly early on (plus I think I probably read the comics beck in the day so it's doubly annoying).
It's a good and entertaining read, and made me realise that my first experience of reading Toby Litt was several years earlier than I thought...
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