Liz Williams, Snake Agent [Library of Babel]

There's been a copy of Snake Agent at the local Borders for a while now, but it kept narrowly losing out to other books. On a recent shopping trip, though, I was buying enough stuff that throwing another trade paperback on the pile was just a small perturbation, so I picked up a copy.

The set-up here sounds like a cross between Jim Butcher and Barry Hughart: Detective Inspector Chen Wei is a policeman in Singapore, assigned to dealing with supernatural crimes. He occasionally descends into Hell to interview murder victims, he deals with demonic incursions into the regular world, and he tracks ghosts and other spirits. When the story opens, he is asked to look into sightings of the ghost of a a prominent politician's daughter, and quickly finds himself investigation a much darker conspiracy with the aid of his demonic counterpart, Seneschal Zhu Irzh.

This is basically a hard-boiled detective novel set in a the world where near-future technology intersects with Chinese mythology. This leads to some fun stuff, as when Zhu Irzh is attempting to investigate the role of one of Hell's Ministries in the conspiracy:

The trouble with Hell, Zhu Irzh reflected bitterly, was not so much the palpable miasma of evil (with which he was, after all, ingrained) but the bureaucracy. This was now the fifth hour he had spent at the Ministry of Epidemics, in the crowded queue for the Second LEvel Third Administrative Assistant's Appointment Maker. At least after the third hour he'd managed to procure a seat, but the room was packed to the bursting point and smelt of sickness and sweat. If he'd known that this was the best Dr. So could do in the matter of contacts, he wouldn't have bothered, though he had to admit that the doctor had at least provided him with the necessary documentation to get through the Ministry's impressive iron portals.

"Stop doing that!" the woman sitting beside him snapped. "It's getting on my nerves!"

Zhu Irzh gazed blankly at her. He hadn't been aware of doing anything at all.

"That."

Her small, pursed mouth opened and a toongue flicked contemptuously in the direction of his tail, which was tapping impatiently against the iron surface of the floor.

I said above that this sounded like Barry Hughart crossed with Jim Butcher, and it largely is. The only real flaw in the book is that it doesn't have as distinctive a voice as either of those authors. The narration is in tight third person, alternating between Chen and Zhu Irzh, with occasional scenes following Chen's wife Inari or his colleague Sergeant Ma, and neither XZhu Irzh nor (especially) Chen is as strong a character as Harry Dresden or Number Ten Ox (let alone Li Kao). The world is fascinatingly novel, though, and the detective plot is very well done, so quibbling about the relative strength of the narration feels a little petty.

This is billed as the first of a series, and I saw the second (The Demon and the City) in the library yesterday. This looks like a very promising series, and I look forward to reading more.