bibliogramma | (no subject)

Snake Agent, Liz Williams.

There are a lot of supernatural detectives going around these days. On TV, and in print, vampires, witches, warlocks, necromancers, werewolves and all sorts of slightly unusual folks are going about solving crimes of a paranormal nature.

I’ll confess to being a fan of the genre, beginning with some of its earlier incarnations – TV’s Forever Knight and the original Kolchak: The Night Stalker (Darrin McGavin is Kolchak, accept no substitutes), the Victory Nelson mysteries by Tanya Huff, the Diana Tregarde investigations by Mercedes Lackey, and so on.

One thing that’s been common to most of these magical mystery tours, however, has been their shared European heritage and Western setting.

Now Liz Williams gives us another take on the paranormal procedural. Set in Singapore Three (in the near future, cities themselves are commercial franchises), in an alternate fantasy earth that’s somewhat ahead of our own technologically, but where gods and demos are real, Snake Agent is the first in a series of novels (three so far) about Inspector Wei Chen, a detective on the Singapore Three police force who has the patronage of Kuan Yin and the magical knowledge and skills required to cross over into Hell if need be to track down a witness, or a criminal. Chen has a few other advantages in dealing with demons, including the fact that he’s married to one. As this is the first novel in the series, we also meet characters who are clearly going to be a part of Inspector Chen’s further adventures, including his opposite number from the investigative forces of Hell, Seneschal Zhu Irzh.

In a genre that can become a little too repetitive (just how many vampire detectives can one handle, anyway?), this novel strikes a new and interesting chord with its use of Chinese supernatural traditions and settings. The book is somewhat light in tone, and brilliantly skewers a number of recognisable personality types and aspects of the human condition, from devout ideologues to self-absorbed bureaucrats, while never losing the forward momentum required of a detective novel.

I’m certainly hooked.