Liz Williams
Snake Agent
Night Shade Books 2008 (original edition 2005)
Inspector Chen is a police detective in "Singapore Three" – one of a series of artificial islands. His special responsibility is for crimes involving the supernatural and for liaison with Hell. His wife is a demon who has a pet badger-spirit disguised as a teapot.
Young girls are dying and their spirits are not ending up in Heaven as they should be but are cropping up in some very strange places in Hell.
Enter Zhu Irzh, a demon officer with Hell’s Vice Squad. Some influential characters in Hell have caused him to stop promoting vice and work out what is going on with these young girls. He and Chen must work together and fight their way through the labyrinthine bureaucracies of Hell and back.
I enjoyed this book in parts. Williams’ vision of Hell as warring bureaucracies of mind-boggling inefficiency is entertaining and amusing. The ill-matched buddy story of Chen and Zhu Irzh works quite well also.
However, I wasn’t completely convinced by the Chinese cultural aspect although I am no expert here. The sinister demon hunter didn’t really go anywhere and in any case lost a certain credibility when the teapot bit his ankle and Chen’s wife pushed him into the harbour.
The supernatural part had a slightly pasted-on feel. The story could pretty much have been the same if we were talking the criminal underworld rather than the demonic one although the chrome would have been different. Substitute kidnapping for spirit-stealing, rival gangs for rival bureaucracies, weapons and lockpicks for magic and there you are.
Nevertheless not a bad read for train, plane or rainy day. Williams has written lots of other stuff since this book was first published in 2005 and I suspect that subsequent Inspector Chen outings will be better. I’d certainly give them a try. Three stars.
Lisa Lutz
Curse of the Spellmans
Simon and Schuster 2008
Curse of the Spellmans is the sequel to The Spellman Files which was published in 2006. I didn’t review the original (Imperial Purple didn’t exist then) but I enjoyed it a lot. As well as being smart and sassy it had a surprising amount of real human feeling in it – particularly in the relationship of the central character (Isabel (Izzy) Spellman) and her little sister, Rae.
I am happy to say that Lutz has kept up the good work. Possibly spending two years on the book rather than rushing it out in a year has helped. Certainly it has a polished feel to it.
The Spellmans are a disfunctional family of Private Investigators. They compulsively spy on each other, record each other’s conversations and follow each other around, eager to acquire whatever is needed to blackmail the other before being blackmailed in turn. Izzy has noticed suspicious things happening with her family – her Dad is going to the gym and eating tofu, her Mom sneaks out in the night to vandalise motorbikes, her big brother David has abandoned his law business and sits around all day drinking and her little sister Rae is pestering a policeman old enough to be her father and has just run him over with her car. Oh yes, and her best friend has run away and refuses all contact.
All this is nothing compared to the suspicious behaviour of their new neighbour. What else can you say of a man who keeps his office locked, even when he is the only one there; who shreds his correspondence and puts different parts of it into the garbage separately thereby making it impossible to reconstruct; whose very household waste has nothing suspicious in it? Women he contacts just disappear. Is he using his cover as a landscape gardener to hide the bodies?
Izzy is determined to work it all out. Nothing, not even being arrested four times (twice at the behest of her own family), is going to stop her. You’ll have to read it yourself to get the plot details – I’m not going to spoil it for you – but suffice to say that all is revealed and wrapped up exceedingly well.
A worthy successor to an excellent first book. Go and buy it. Four stars.
Robert B. Parker
Stranger in Paradise
Quercus. 2008
When you buy a Robert B. Parker novel you know what you are getting. The protagonists will be strong, internalised and with no respect for position, only for person. Spenser and Hawk are the most famous but there are others and probably the most successful of these is the Paradise series starring Jesse Stone.
Jesse Stone fits the mold. Fired from the L.A. cops for being drunk on the job he has found redemption as the Police Chief of a small town in Massachusetts called Paradise. He fits in like a barracuda in a goldfish pond but the little fish come to appreciate his strength and, on occasion, ruthlessness. This is the seventh book in the series.
A self-proclaimed Apache warrior named Wilson Cromartie (Crow) is Jesse’s main opposition. We saw him as one of the bad guys in Trouble in Paradise where his one redeeming feature was an odd chivalry towards women. Ten years later he has returned and is looking for someone. He and Jesse are of a type and the mutual respect they have transcends, up to a point, their good-guy/bad guy relationship. For Spenser fans, think Hawk and you won’t be too far out.
The plot is predictable but then you knew that when you bought the book. Parker’s style gets sparser and sparser the more he writes but it is a paring down of an already sparse style, not the style of an author who no longer cares. After ten years Jesse seems to be finally getting the sometimes tedious on-and-off relationship with his ex-wife under control which I, for one, appreciate.
The book doesn’t break any new ground but it delivers on Parker’s usual promise – a fast-paced, well-written story about tough guys and what they do. I read it and enjoyed it and moved on. Three stars.
Posts