The first chapter is perhaps one of the most brilliant I have read: tight, exact, culturally specific, and with momentum that propelled me through the rest of the book. Eventually, Vimes decided to shake the man up, and swore him in as a special constable for the duration of an impending street fight of roughly a thousand trolls and dwarves. Each chapter in the book is narrated by a different character (with one chapter consisting of the journal entries of an earlier narrator). The Watch had a brief respite in AM 1688, following the Ankh-Morpork Civil War, when Commander Suffer-Not-Injustice Vimes and his Ironheads became the city's rulers. He is described as a neat little man, with very shiny shoes, and has no friends and no sense of humour.

In off-duty moments, he goes door to door with his fellow Omnian, Smite-the-Unbeliever-with-Cunning-Arguments. Along the way you’ll learn about Paul Newman’s Daytona, discover the watch FDR wore to the historic Yalta conference after World War II, and experience the dozens of individual stories of how a watch won over its owner.He said he was content to ringing a bell and yell all's well, "provided of course that 'all is well'". On a few occasions, the debates are overdone and the characters teeter on the edge of simply becoming mouthpieces for the author.

Hranek poignantly illustrates this idea through his compilation of narratives about men and their watches. This role perfectly fit the above described qualities, especially as the Traffic Squad is "self-financing" (i.Vimes works out how to make the Cube play its message, in the presence of the current King of the Dwarves, and the truth of Koom Valley is heard for the first time in hundreds of years.