Snake Agent

Description

Introducing Singaporean DI, Wei Chen. "This exotic amalgam of police procedural, SF, comic fantasy, and horror is a delight from start to finish" (Locus). 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.

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.

"A sleuthing feast for those with a taste for the exotic." -Publishers Weekly "Snake Agent combines disparate elements of Chinese mythology, urban fantasy, science fiction and mystery to create a rich milieu and a highly entertaining story." -Jacqueline Carey, author of Kushiel's Justice "This exotic amalgam of police procedural, SF, comic fantasy, and horror is a delight from start to finish." -Locus