Simon Kurt Unsworth. (2015). The Devil's Detective: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Simon Kurt Unsworth. 2015. The Devil's Detective: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Simon Kurt Unsworth, The Devil's Detective: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015.

Simon Kurt Unsworth. The Devil's Detective: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015.

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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Unsworth, Simon Kurt
   • bioText: Simon Kurt Unsworth was born in Manchester and lives in a farmhouse in Cumbria, in the United Kingdom. He is the author of many short stories, including the collection Quiet Houses. The Devil's Detective is his first novel.
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The Devil's Detective

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Debut novelist Simon Kurt Unsworth sends the detective novel to Hell. In The Devil's Detective, a sea change is coming to Hell . . . and a man named Thomas Fool is caught in the middle.
     Thomas Fool is an Information Man, an investigator tasked with cataloging and filing reports on the endless stream of violence and brutality that flows through Hell. His job holds no reward or satisfaction, because Hell has rules but no justice. Each new crime is stamped "Do Not Investigate" and dutifully filed away in the depths of the Bureaucracy. But when an important political delegation arrives and a human is found murdered in a horrific manner—extravagant even by Hell's standards—everything changes. The murders escalate, and their severity points to the kind of killer not seen for many generations. Something is challenging the rules and order of Hell, so the Bureaucracy sends Fool to identify and track down the killer. . . . But how do you investigate murder in a place where death is common currency? Or when your main suspect pool is a legion of demons? With no memory of his past and only an irresistible need for justice, Fool will piece together clues and follow a trail that leads directly into the heart of a dark and chaotic conspiracy. A revolution is brewing in Hell . . . and nothing is what it seems. 
     The Devil's Detective is an audacious, highly suspenseful thriller set against a nightmarish and wildly vivid world. Simon Kurt Unsworth has created a phantasmagoric thrill ride filled with stunning set pieces and characters that spring from our deepest nightmares. It will have readers of both thrillers and horror hanging on by their fingernails until the final word. In Hell, hope is your worst enemy.

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reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Hugh Howey, New York Times Bestselling author of Wool
   • content: "With the character of Fool, Simon Kurt Unsworth has crafted a hero among the damned. Original, tense, and full of twists, this is one hell of a great read."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Michael Marshall Smith, bestselling author of The Intruders and The Straw Men
   • content: "Dark and luminous, compelling and insidious, The Devil's Detective is a novel that transcends genre."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Andrew Pyper, author of The Demonologist and The Damned
   • content: "Hell as the setting for a noir investigation turns out to be as fun as it sounds in The Devil's Detective. Inventive and pacy, Simon Kurt Unsworth has created a world--underworld?--distinctly his own."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Alison Littlewood, author of A Cold Season
   • content: "Inventive and intriguing--Unsworth turns a journey through Hell into a heavenly read."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus
   • content: "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...A grand, nightmarish page-turner that will have you riveted no matter how much you'd prefer to look away."
6. • premium: False
   • source: BookPeople's Blog (Austin, TX)
   • content: "It is uncanny how a writer can so easily create a work that revitalizes a genre and sends it in a new direction simultaneously leading the reader on a breathless chase after clues that reassert the book's place as a solid detective mystery....[The Devil's Detective is] truly a genre bending and thrilling literary mystery you won't soon forget. Certainly my favorite book of 2015 so far!"
7. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     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”).

8. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     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.

9. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     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.)

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Debut novelist Simon Kurt Unsworth sends the detective novel to Hell. In The Devil's Detective, a sea change is coming to Hell . . . and a man named Thomas Fool is caught in the middle.
     Thomas Fool is an Information Man, an investigator tasked with cataloging and filing reports on the endless stream of violence and brutality that flows through Hell. His job holds no reward or satisfaction, because Hell has rules but no justice. Each new crime is stamped "Do Not Investigate" and dutifully filed away in the depths of the Bureaucracy. But when an important political delegation arrives and a human is found murdered in a horrific manner—extravagant even by Hell's standards—everything changes. The murders escalate, and their severity points to the kind of killer not seen for many generations. Something is challenging the rules and order of Hell, so the Bureaucracy sends Fool to identify and track down the killer. . . . But...

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