The Demon and the City

Description

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.

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.

"Williams weaves a rich, complicated tapestry that merges life with afterlife, otherworldly with worldly and human with inhuman." -Publishers Weekly "A smooth, sharp read. [Williams] turns the conventions of good and evil on their ear and gives them a sharp boot in the rear." -Jay Lake, author of Rocket Science "Uniquely imaginative . . . satisfyingly suspenseful." -Booklist