Snake Agent

Snake Agent
Liz Williams
Night Shade Books

375 pages
January 2008

Impressed with my last Night Shade title (the wonderful Wastelands), I moved with typical speed (!) onto Snake Agent, the book that arrived in the same package over a month ago... With my latest forays into the vampire sub-genre of urban fantasy, I thought something that was a little unusual would be perfect...

With the police force of Singapore 3, Inspector Chen specialises in the jobs that half the police force doubt exist, and the other half are terrified of: the supernatural: namely Hell, and, in some cases, Heaven. Snake Agent depicts a a near-future earth -- where interaction between Hell & Heaven is becoming more and more normal (so long as you have a visa, perforce: can't have just anybody wandering in (and out) of Hell!) ;)

Under the protection of his Goddess, Chen is charged with finding a murdered girl, due in Heaven, but who has ended up somewhere with rather less fluffy cherubim and rather more snarling, erm, things. Actually, that's probably unfair of me... something I really enjoyed in Snake Agent was the exploring of stereotypes; when Seneschal Zhu Irzh, a demon, member of Hell's own police force comes into the story, it was great to see his interactions with Chen, and also, later, Irzh's reflections on his own often-hidden flaws -- compassion, mercy, benevolence. Great fun.

I really loved the idea of a beaurocratic oriental Hell -- with the intercenine bickering between the various Ministries of Hell (War, Epidemics, etc, etc), each vying for power and kudos by coming up with the right ways to attack earth -- so long as it wasn't a too costly, time-consuming, form-filling job. And the, ahem, balance between Hell and Heaven was maintained. I also liked that Williams managed to make allusions to the current situations in our world -- with Hell actually coming up with lots of the technological breakthroughs -- that way we can use these advances to damage ourselves: no work required for busy demons. It was cleverly done, and funny too.

In fact, Hell, for all it's Vices, was a really fun place to visit! Williams doesn't by any means glorify the place, but she definitely took a non-stereotypical approach to it.

Towards the end of the novel, it seemed that a character came out of nowhere (well, Hell, actually) merely to help the plot move along, and while the nature of the character was itself a minor mystery, this did slightly disappoint me -- and the character turned out to be what I expected! It seemed that closer to the end of Snake Agent, characters seemed to stumble their way around Hell, meeting just everyone they needed, simultaneously bringing all the plotlines together -- there was a fun depiction of some of Hell's Circles, though. Still, these were small flaws in an otherwise original, very entertaining, interesting book.

The other books in the series are being published in monthly intervals (this one last month, another in February, March and then another in May -- after that, I'm not too sure!). I'll definitely be getting hold of them!

For more information:

Amazon UK
Amazon US

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