There’s a sort of trance that a person can go into when they’re doing something they’re extremely practiced at. After a sufficient number of repetitions, the body will sometimes take over control while the brain wanders off to get a cup of coffee. Unfortunately, the body sometimes gets it wrong, and thus many a prospective spouse has looked down suddenly after a long session with the wedding invitations at a very annoyed cat stuffed halfway into an expensive envelope.

“They lay in the dark, guarding. There was no way of measuring the passage of time, nor any inclination to measure it. There was a time when they had not been here, and there would be a time, presumably, when they would, once more, not be here. They would be somewhere else. This time in between was immaterial.”

This can happen to authors too, and sadly, it’s time now to talk about Making Money. Terry Pratchett has released a book roughly every six months for nearly 25 years, which is prodigious by anybody’s reckoning. It might be expected that output on that level would statistically have to produce a fair amount of utter crap, but for the most part that hasn’t been the case. But Making Money definitely shows signs of having been rushed out the door without really being finished.

This 37th Discworld novel is the second starring the reformed con-man Moist von Lipwig. In Going Postal he is given a last minute reprieve from the gallows and set the seemingly impossible task of resurrecting the city’s moribund postal service. Since this isn’t quite difficult or dangerous enough for him, he also takes on the equally impossible task of wooing Adora Belle Dearheart, a chain-smoking beauty who goes by the nickname ‘Spike’ due to her lethal proficiency with a stiletto heel.

Against all odds he is successful on both counts, and the first pages of Making Money find him at the head of a resurgent Post Office, happily engaged, and bored to the point of breaking into his own office and quite nearly getting killed by his own guards. Conveniently, the city’s banking industry is also in bad shape, and so the tyrannical Lord Vetinari arranges for him to become responsible for the largest, most respected, and most hidebound bank in the city. The family who owns the bank is none too pleased at this and this provides the requisite level of incipient violence that lets our hero do his best work.

By all rights, this should be a great story. Banks are easy to make fun of, rich people are easy to hate AND make fun of, and Moist von Lipwick is a wonderful combination of insecurity and dashing flair. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work out that way. The villains aren’t really villainous enough and so we never really feel like our hero is in any real danger of failing. On the occasions when things do look bad for him, aid arrives unannounced and mostly unexplained to resolve the problem without any particular effort on his part.

The story ends with a twist that is either the largest Deus Ex Machina that has ever appeared in a Discworld novel, or a secondary plot that is almost completely unconnected and undeveloped. The relationship between Moist and Spike doesn’t really go much of anywhere and the whole story just sort of rolls along to the more or less expected ending.

Overall, this really feels like a story that got pulled from the oven before it was done, either because a publisher was breathing down his neck, or because he just got bored with it and published it so he wouldn’t have to look at it anymore. Many parts of the story aren’t as tightly written as we’re used to from Pratchett, and some parts don’t even really make any sense. There are still moments of comedic genius here that will have you snorting milk out your nose, but I can’t escape the sense that the author was just in a hurry to get this off his plate so he could get back to something else he was more interested in.