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Chargement... Snake Agent: A Detective Inspector Chen Novel (Detective Inspector Chen Novels) (original 2005; édition 2008)par Liz Williams
Information sur l'oeuvreSnake Agent par Liz Williams (2005)
Chargement...
Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. Giving up on page 65, mostly because I'm just not connecting with or hooked by it. I like our demon protag more than our human protag, but neither of them is really delivered in rich and interesting detail. I'm very interested in Inari, but she's delivered in dribs and drabs without deep emotional connection. The book is ill-served (for me) by some other decisions. Weirdly, I find the typeset design unhelpful to my engagement - the text is almost full out to the edges of the page, which only emphasises a prose style that runs to long paragraphs without dialogue (and made me a little weary every time I turned a page). And I'm made very uncomfortable by the author's decision to use the deprecated and Western Wade-Giles romanisation, rather than the Chinese-preferred and official Pinyin. (I'm also made mildly uncomfortable by the decision to refer to the hero's Guanyin prayer beads as a rosary, though I appreciate it's possibly a technically correct usage.) The Housemate has been raving about these books for several months, so I thought I'd dive in in December, a month which, so far, has not been what I would call either comforting or joyous. Fortunately, she was dead right about the Inspector Chen novels. Snake Agent, the first of the series, is an intriguingly different sort of detective fiction which takes place in a world where magic, magical creatures, gods and goddesses, heaven, hell, demons and ghosts all have a role to play in the mystery of a young woman whose soul is stolen after her death, and wrongly sent to Hell. Detective Inspector Wei Chen, a human detective who nevertheless is quite familiar with the supernatural, takes on the case with the help of a demonic detective who also has a stake in the outcome. Chen serves the goddess Kuan Yin, but they're not on the best of terms because he has married a demon who he rescued from Hell. When his beloved wife is forcibly returned to Hell, he knows he's on his own. I'm not as conversant with Chinese culture as I might wish to be, so much of Williams' story was even stranger to me than it might otherwise have been. The series has been likened to The Dresden Files books, or John Constantine's adventures, and I think both are apt, but it's very much outside the western fantasy sphere. It is deeply eastern, deeply Chinese in flavor, and for me that meant taking in an extra layer of meaning and experience. It's not difficult since Williams is a good writer, and it makes the reading all the more rewarding. If you're up for something different, something fantastic, mysterious, and well-written, you might want to give the first book of the series a try. The mystery is solid, the characters won me over, and the humor is subtle. I'm anxious to read the next book in the series now. aucune critique | ajouter une critique
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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. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)823.92Literature English English fiction Modern Period 2000-Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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And the world that Liz Williams creates is one that sticks with you. ( )