THREE SHADES OF NIGHT has an interesting premise; it tells the same story from the perspective of characters from three different lines in the WORLD OF DARKNESS game line; vampires, werewolves, and mages. As game fiction, each story (and each one was penned separately) is interesting as flavor text for its respective game line. The reader sees how sample characters interact in the Chicago setting, what their societies are like, and how their special abilities manifest themselves. And I will say that I thoroughly enjoyed the entire book and would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in the WORLD OF DARKNESS game lines.
THREE SHADES OF NIGHT does suffer some drawbacks, however (which is natural, considering the innate complexity of the undertaking). There are two worth mentioning here; first, there is the problem of the interaction of the three novellas. The first is the vampire one, which tells a great story and could stand alone very nicely. The events are well-developed, plenty of mystery, and whatever happens behind the scenes (covered in the other two novellas) is reasonable to be outside the scope of "The Murder of Crows". The second, on werewolves, tells some of the same events from the werewolf perspective but has plenty of additional material with a fresh perspective. The gimmick is cute at this point. The third story is on mages, and by now I didn't want to read the same events from yet another perspective. The author fortunately clued in on this and left a coda to represent events done to death. However, it makes the mage story much weaker than the others because it isn't complete (nor entirely coherent).
This brings the second point - you need a good conspiracy to unwind the same mystery from three different perspectives. Unfortunately, a bad conspiracy comes off as contrived or incoherent - THREE SHADES went for incoherent. Some of that is necessary - for instance, information presented as mysterious in one novella is well understood in the other, and the clues are supposed to all fit together. However, many parts are never well explained but are central to the story. I didn't understand the point of the Crone ritual in the vampire story, the difference in the 2 main spirits in the werewolf story, or why they were in conflict. Or what the voices were in the mage story. I understand that they tie together in the end, but they come across more as plot devices than integral parts of the story.
Still, all three were a good read (maybe the first 2 moreso); the book as a whole was pretty compelling and I stayed up pretty late just to finish it. It has its flaws, but they don't obscure the work in its entirety.