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A review by merricatct
The Devil's Detective by Simon Kurt Unsworth
4.0
A detective novel in Hell! I normally don't love noir or detective type stories, but when I read the description of this one, I knew I had to give it a try.
First of all, this book is worth the price of admission for the setting alone. I love urban fiction, where the city is just as much a character as the actual people, and this book does not disappoint. Hell as a huge walled city, complete with districts and landmarks, surrounded by the ocean of Limbo, is not an image I'll soon forget! I loved following along with Thomas Fool as he explored the different areas of Hell, from the halls of the Bureaucracy to the farms that grow the meager crop to feed Hell's citizens. This is not a typical medieval "fire and brimstone" type Hell, but disturbing images and horror abound nonetheless.
My biggest complaint with the book is that while so much went into the worldbuilding of Hell, it seems like nothing was left for the characters themselves. Fool is often little more than a glorified tour guide, both textually and metaphorically, giving us exposition about Hell and its denizens as he travels from place to place. If the author could've given us fleshed-out characters to equal this fleshed-out dystopian bureaucratic Hell, this would've been a book for the ages!
First of all, this book is worth the price of admission for the setting alone. I love urban fiction, where the city is just as much a character as the actual people, and this book does not disappoint. Hell as a huge walled city, complete with districts and landmarks, surrounded by the ocean of Limbo, is not an image I'll soon forget! I loved following along with Thomas Fool as he explored the different areas of Hell, from the halls of the Bureaucracy to the farms that grow the meager crop to feed Hell's citizens. This is not a typical medieval "fire and brimstone" type Hell, but disturbing images and horror abound nonetheless.
My biggest complaint with the book is that while so much went into the worldbuilding of Hell, it seems like nothing was left for the characters themselves. Fool is often little more than a glorified tour guide, both textually and metaphorically, giving us exposition about Hell and its denizens as he travels from place to place. If the author could've given us fleshed-out characters to equal this fleshed-out dystopian bureaucratic Hell, this would've been a book for the ages!