Snake Agent: Liz Williams

Detective Inspector Chen is the agent with the Singapore Three Police Department who gets assigned the supernatural cases. So when the ghost of the recently deceased daughter of a prominent Chinese businessman is photographed in Hell instead of Heaven where she belongs, it's up to Chen to find out why and bring her back. But when she's taken back from Hell, the underworld sends their own agent, a Vice police demon named Seneschal Zhu Irzh, to reclaim her. These conflicting agendas clash but, when evidence turns up that implicates the deceased's own father in the girl's murder and delivery to Hell, the two officers have to put aside their differences to uncover the conspiracy that lies at the heart of the situation.

In order to get to the bottom of things, Chen has to partner with Zhu Irzh as a snake agent - a human agent infiltrating Hell - and find out why all these human ghosts are being sent to Hell with forged papers. The deeper they get, the more dangerous things get, and the higher into Hell's society the conspiracy seems to reach. But Chen may have burned his only bridges by traveling to Hell without his patron goddess' blessing, and when you're alone in Hell with a demon you don't trust...the chances of making it back to the world of the living get slimmer by the minute.

Liz Williams' Snake Agent is the first in her series of novels featuring Detective Inspector Wei Chen. The books blur Chinese mythology and mysticism, cyberpunk and good old fashioned police work into a densely crafted world where the mortal plane, Heaven and Hell all exist intertwined. How can you go wrong with that scenario? Just read Snake Agent to find out. The novel is absolutely devoid of interesting content. Any action sequences are told through a point of view so devoid of involvement that I found myself eager to get back to the similarly disinteresting character building. Descriptions of landscapes and locations are bland and tend to be lacking in detail or modeled after descriptions in Oriental travel brochures. Even the bioweb - a human powered internet - gets a fleeting enough depiction to render hundreds of naked girls floating in tanks and hooked up to wires remarkably unexciting.

And the killing blow for this was the language. When not beating us with the fact that she can use big words together in the most unlikely of combinations, Williams falls back on using the same words repeatedly - internecine, august (in the adjective sense) and miasma, which is used at least seven times in the book. Seven. It might not seem like a big deal, spread out over 350 pages, but seriously, seven times. I don't think I used the word miasma seven times in my life. It's very amateurish and distracting and yanks you right out of what little involvement you manage to build up while reading. Both Williams and her editor need their knuckles smacked with a ruler. For shame.
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Publisher: Night Shade Books
Pub. Date: January 2008
ISBN-13: 9781597801072