โ Scribed by Liz Williams
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
The shade of Charlie Chan hovers over Williams's entertaining supernatural mystery, the first in a new series starring Det. Insp. Wei Chen of Singapore Three's 13th precinct. In a near future that allows travel between Heaven and Hell and Earth, "snake agent" Chen finds himself in hot pursuit of ghost-girl Pearl Tang and the father who murdered her to protect his business of "supplying the souls of the virtuous to Hell." Chen is not only a crack paranormal crime investigator but also a licensed feng shui practitioner never without his compass. While the plot might have benefited from a few more action scenes and some martial arts, Williams (The Banquet of the Lords of the Night) provides a sleuthing feast for those with a taste for the exotic Orient.
Copyright ยฉ Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
In late twenty-first-century Singapore, detective inspector Wei Chen is a snake agent, a detective whose beat reaches to the fringes of Heaven and Hell. Married to a demon wife and surrounded by wary colleagues, he is nevertheless bored with investigating routine exorcism scams and bogus feng shui licenses. Then the newly deceased ghost of a wealthy industrialist's daughter fails to make her appointed arrival in Heaven. When it quickly becomes obvious that the industrialist himself is implicated in a netherworldly soul-trafficking scheme and is responsible for his daughter's death, Chen has to work with an unlikely sidekick, Zhu Irzh, one of Hell's own vice detectives and a demon cursed with a conscience. Twice nominated for Philip K. Dick awards, Williams should easily qualify for another with this original and stirring blend of futuristic technology and chilling excursions into postmortem landscapes. This first odd-couple pairing of mortal Chen and immortal Zhu Irzh opens a prospective series. Carl Hays
Copyright ยฉ American Library Association. All rights reserved
๐ SIMILAR VOLUMES
### From Publishers Weekly The shade of Charlie Chan hovers over Williams's entertaining supernatural mystery, the first in a new series starring Det. Insp. Wei Chen of Singapore Three's 13th precinct. In a near future that allows travel between Heaven and Hell and Earth, "snake agent" Chen finds h
### From Publishers Weekly The shade of Charlie Chan hovers over Williams's entertaining supernatural mystery, the first in a new series starring Det. Insp. Wei Chen of Singapore Three's 13th precinct. In a near future that allows travel between Heaven and Hell and Earth, "snake agent" Chen finds h
### From Publishers Weekly The shade of Charlie Chan hovers over Williams's entertaining supernatural mystery, the first in a new series starring Det. Insp. Wei Chen of Singapore Three's 13th precinct. In a near future that allows travel between Heaven and Hell and Earth, "snake agent" Chen finds h
When a soul goes missing, an occult detective ventures into Hell to retrieve it When the fourteen-year-old daughter of Singapore Three's most prominent industrialist dies of anorexia, her parents assume that Pearl's suffering has come to an end. But somewhere along the way to the Celestial Shores,