Between Heaven and Hell

[bibliogramma]

The Demon and the City, Liz Williams

The second of Williams’s Detective Investigator Chen mysteries, The Demon and the City, was as usual an intriguing and well-written story, but unfortunately, rather light on Detective Inspector Chen, who does not appear until about half-way through the book. The bulk of the preliminary investigation falls to his newly assigned demon associate Zhu Irzh, whom we met in the first book – and while I do enjoy the character, I’m more interested in Chen, and in the interplay between the two, than I am in the former vice cop from Hell. However, when Chen does appear on the scene – and even more so when his former patron deity Kwan Yin arrives to help them save Heaven and Earth – the full flavour of the first novel is back.

The first novel gave us a quite thorough tour of Hell – this novel shows us much more about Heaven in this unique fantasy based on Chinese religious traditions, and furthermore gives us some hints about how the different religious traditions in this fantasy near-future Earth interact.

It’s a tale of a complex plot involving a Chinese goddess, the patron saint of dowsers and fung shui practitioners who is dissatisfied with her Celestial position, Jhai Tserai, an Indian deva or spirit masquerading as human, who is the head of the very powerful Paugeng corporation, and a large cast of humans, demons, Celestial beings and assorted other creatures.

The story opens with the gruesome death of wealthy heiress Deveth Sardai, whose mutilated corpse disappears from the morgue almost before a bored and sexually frustrated Seneschal Zhu Irzh can begin his investigations. Deveth, it turns out, is the former lover of Robin Yuan, a lab employee at Paugeng whose current assignment is to monitor what she thinks of as “the experiment” – an otherworldly being, believed to be some kind of demon or other Hellspawn, who is being subjected to experimentation and modification under the direct orders of Jhai Tserai.

Williams has more than just action going on here, of course. There are some very interesting perspectives on the nature of good and evil as the story progresses and we see characters from Heaven, Hell and Earth acting and interacting in unexpected ways.

In short, a rollicking good read with some philosophical underpinnings, but I do hope there’s more of Detective Chen as well as Seneschal Irzh in the next volume of the series.