The Demon and the City (The Detective Inspector Chen Novels) - Softcover

Williams, Liz

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1480438065 ISBN 13: 9781480438064

Publisher: Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy, 2013

Synopsis

In this “satisfyingly suspenseful” urban fantasy, a demon teams up with a human detective on the Singapore police force (Booklist).

Zhu Irzh is having trouble adjusting to life on Earth. The food is bland, the colors dim, and the weather much too chilly for a demon used to the balmy climate of the underworld. Recently attached to the Singapore Three police department, Zhu Irzh has been assigned to help humans like Detective Inspector Chen investigate cases that overlap this world and the world to come. But how dedicated can a demon be to justice when his last assignment was to Hell’s vice squad—whose job is not to prevent vice, but to promote it?
Zhu Irzh is pondering these philosophical questions when he catches his first murder case: the savage killing of a rich would-be witch outside of the occult market. Chen is on a well-deserved vacation, so the demon takes charge himself, unearthing a supernatural conspiracy that proves Hell holds no monopoly on evil.
The Demon and the City is the second of the five Detective Inspector Chen Novels, which also include Snake Agent 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:

The sequel to Snake Agent (2005) returns to Singapore Three, a twenty-first-century cityscape renowned for its ready access to the denizens of heaven and hell. While Detective Inspector Wei Chen takes a brief hiatus from his customary paranormal investigations, his underworld sidekick, vice-squad-specialist Zhu Irzh, stumbles on a tricky case involving the apparently demonic murder of a beautiful young woman. When the trail leads to the heiress of the powerful Paugeng Corporation, Zhu Irzh feels inexplicably drawn to this devilishly ruthless but very human woman and inadvertently implicates himself as a murder suspect. Chen's return to sort things out only complicates matters, however, as the pair tracks other suspects, including an enigmatic demon the corporation has been harboring for experimental purposes and a celestial goddess whose unlikely alliance with hell threatens to rain chaos down on the earthbound. Fantasy enthusiasts looking for something uniquely imaginative will find it in Williams' surreal fusion of Chinese mythology, paranormal high jinks, and satisfyingly suspenseful sleuthing. Carl Hays
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1480438065
• ISBN 13: 9781480438064
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368