Snake Agent (Detective Inspector Chen, 1) - Hardcover

Williams, Liz

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1480481076 ISBN 13: 9781480481077

Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road, 2014

Synopsis

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, Pearl’s soul is waylaid, lured by an unknown force to the gates of Hell. To save their daughter from eternal banishment, they come to Detective Inspector Wei Chen, whose jurisdiction lies between this world and the next.
A round-faced cop who is as serious as his beat is strange, Chen has a demon for a wife and a comfort with the supernatural that most mortals cannot match. But finding Pearl Tang will take him further into the abyss than ever before—to a mystifying place where he will have to cooperate with a demonic detective if he wants to survive. It’s easy, Chen will find, to get into Hell. The hard part is getting out.
Snake Agent is the first of the five Detective Inspector Chen Novels, which continue with The Demon and the City and Precious Dragon. 

About this title

About the Author

Liz Williams is a science fiction and fantasy writer living in Glastonbury, England, where she is codirector of a witchcraft supply business. The author of seventeen novels and over one hundred short stories, she has been published by Bantam Spectra and Night Shade Books in the US, and by Tor Macmillan in the UK. She was a frequent contributor to Realms of Fantasy, and her writing appears regularly in Asimov’s and other magazines. She is the secretary of the Milford SF Writers’ Workshop and teaches creative writing and history of science fiction. 

From Booklist

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
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About this edition

• Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1480481076
• ISBN 13: 9781480481077
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 410