The Devil's Detective

January 5, 2015
Unsworth’s care in constructing an imaginary world enables him to make the most of his debut’s challenging concept: a hard-boiled detective novel set in Hell itself. Thomas Fool is one of Hell’s Information Men, but he lacks the resources or time to investigate, let alone solve, most of the crimes he’s alerted to. Like all other human residents of the underworld, Fool is incapable of atoning for the sins that brought him there, as he’s been robbed of the memories of what they were. And hope for a reprieve is limited, because those who are elevated to Heaven are selected according to rules that are only understood by the bureaucracies of Heaven and Hell. Fool’s routine gets a jolt from the coincidence of two unusual events: he’s asked to serve as escort for a heavenly delegation headed by the angel Adam, and then he encounters a murder victim whose soul was removed by the killer. Unsworth offers intriguing variations on traditional themes and some memorably hair-raising prose (“The house was blind but not mute, and it screamed at them”).

February 15, 2015
Even hell has crime. And somebody has to go through...well, you know...to bring criminals to justice.Keeping up with changing times, hell is no longer a smoldering, glowing array of cauldrons, ovens and other barbecue pits that smell like brimstone. Think, instead, of the worst city you've visited in your life and imagine it being even ickier; where nothing smells or tastes good, public transportation is literally the pits, and there are pesky little demons waiting at every dimly illuminated corner to snap at you and bite your skin. This being hell, there is also a bureaucracy with rules. And when the rules are violated by theft and even murder, hell has at its disposal condemned little people such as Thomas Fool, one of the nether region's "Information Men" assigned to look into egregious brutalities that not even hell's masters (wherever they are) will tolerate. And when bodies of young people start turning up in such horrifically deformed shapes that their very souls are sucked clean, Fool is compelled both from within and without this underworld to investigate this bewildering serial murder case-which may auger yet another transfiguration of this Very Bad Place. With wit, ingenuity and prodigious timing, first-time British novelist Unsworth imagines an unsettling afterlife that at times feels uncomfortably close to some of the more unbearable regions of our waking dreams. The whodunit aspects of this novel may, in the end, be less interesting than the phantasmagorical details surrounding it. But that's far less a complaint than a compliment of the author's visionary gifts. A grand, nightmarish page-turner that will have you riveted no matter how much you'd prefer to look away.

February 1, 2015
Here's a clever spin on the traditional police procedural. Thomas Fool, a human resident of Hell, is an Information Man, an investigator. When an especially brutal murder is discovered at pretty much the worst possible timeheavenly visitors have just arrived for a tourThomas is under tremendous pressure to solve the case. But how do you solve a crime in Hell, where brutality is so common that most crimes don't even get investigated? And how do you catch a killer when the killer is a demon? Unsworth, a British author of numerous horror and supernatural short stories, makes his book-length debut, and it's a rousing success. The story is well crafted, and the setting is ingeniously conceived: Hell is a real, tactile place, with a bureaucracy and corporate structure. We've seen other novels set in Hell, but we haven't seen a Hell quite like this. Whether the premise is strong enough to support a series is an interesting question; at the very least, another novel would be most welcome.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)