In Russia, Sergei Lukyanenko's Night Watch series has spawned an enormous multimedia franchise. Comparisons are made on the jacket of this book to Harry Potter, which is fair enough on the latter's home ground. A better fit, though, might be those magic/vampire/romance series which have enormous and dedicated readerships but have not yet broken out of their core fan groups. Such titles include Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga (which has been filmed), Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse series (currently a US television show) and Laurell K Hamilton's Anita Blake books (which have derailed, weirdly, from romance to sado-porn but show no sign of flagging).

All these take place in slightly altered versions of our own world where witches, vampires, shapeshifters, wizards and goblins live among regular humans, having complex interspecies relationships and carrying on feuds, factions and interventions in the destiny of mankind which won't culminate in a world-changing apocalypse until the stories run out.

Lukyanenko offers a distinctively post-Soviet take on the genre. In his universe, the forces of Light and Dark magic are so evenly aligned that centuries ago they made a truce to avoid a war of mutual destruction. They now police each other's activities. Prohibited from intervening too obviously in our world, they nudge new recruits into either camp, issue human-hunting licences to vampires and curb the tendencies of magicians to perform too-public miracles.

Anton Gorodetsky, the series hero, works for the Moscow branch of the Night Watch, which is charged with regulating the "Dark Others" and is opposed in a cold war face-off by the similarly bureaucratic Day Watch. Initially, the conflict - as seen in Night Watch (2004) and Day Watch (2006), the films based on two-thirds of the first book - was a clash between Light and Dark, with plotlines generated by the deviousness of the faction chiefs.

The climax of the film series - which Lukyanenko writes off in an aside here as a parallel reality - was a return to all-out war, but the books have followed other tracks, revealing that the history of communism from Stalin to Gorbachev was a side-effect of a magical experiment and turning away from the conflict between good and evil in favour of stories in which the Night and Day Watches unite to deal with rogue threats.

The Last Watch, the fourth in the series, is billed as the sequel to the Night Watch trilogy and comes with a title that flirts with - but doesn't deliver - finality. All the books present three linked novellas that set up, wander away from and return to a major thread.

It would be hard work hopping aboard the bus here, since the premise is that Anton comes up against a mysterious cabal of non-aligned Others - the Last Watch - who are out to retrieve and exploit Merlin's crown, which is supposed to be buried in a layer of the Twilight (an alternate dimension accessible only to the gifted, which is the most vivid idea in the series).

All three Others are holdovers from earlier books, supporting characters or guest stars bumped up to villain status - though, like many a mid-series writer, Lukyanenko has a tendency to defuse suspense through his reluctance to tamper with earlier happy endings. Anton now has an enchantress wife and a potentially messianic toddler who are tidied away into a domestic subplot, while the vengeance-seeking vampire who wants to tear the hero and his loved ones apart keeps being overruled by a higher-minded witch.

A slightly prosaic translation notwithstanding, the appeal of the series for English-language readers is the overlay of fantastical elements on the troubled, complicated world of the former Soviet Union. Here we also get a trip to Scotland to find a real vampire lurking in the Edinburgh Dungeon tourist attraction, offering a foreign view of the familiar, but the middle segment, set in Samarkand, is more striking. In post-Soviet Uzbekistan, the forces of good and evil are so impotent in the face of mass indifference that they save money by sharing offices.

 Kim Newman's books include Dracula Cha Cha Cha (Pocket).