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The Devil's Detective - Hardcover

Buch 1 von 2: Thomas Fool

Unsworth, Simon Kurt

 
9780385539340: The Devil's Detective
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385539347 ISBN 13: 9780385539340
Verlag: DOUBLEDAY & CO, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

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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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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 collectionQuiet Houses. The Devil's Detective is his first novel.

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1

The day began with Gordie, who knocked on Fool’s door and entered the room without waiting. He bustled over to Fool, waving a blue-­ribboned canister in front of him like a torch that had lost its light as Fool pulled himself up onto an elbow, rubbing one hand across eyes that were thick with sleep. He was pleased to see that in Gordie’s other hand was a mug, steam curling out from it and bringing with it the smell of weak, thin coffee. Gordie set the mug down on the table by Fool’s bed and said, “One came through. It’s blue. I’ve never seen a blue before.”

Fool picked up the mug and sipped, glad of the heat of the coffee on his tongue even if the taste was buried beneath its scald. He twisted, careful not to spill his drink, and looked up at the high, small window, trying to work out from the light coming in around the grimy linen blind what time of day it was. Beams of gray, sickly illumination crawled across the wall at low angles, throwing shadows from right to left, meaning it was still morning. Escort duty hadn’t finished until . . . when? Sometime between the bars starting to close and the factories starting to open, he thought. He had returned in darkness, that he remembered, although his eyes had populated the nighttime shadows with after-­images of light, shifting and dancing at the corners of his vision. If it was still morning, he had had only a few hours’ sleep. He groaned and sipped more of his coffee.

“It’s blue,” said Gordie again, helpfully, holding out the canister, its tangle of blue ribbon hanging down in loops. “It’s a blue, it’s just arrived. I saw it was a blue; we never get them, so I thought I’d better bring it to you. I wouldn’t have woken you otherwise, you know. It might be a Fallen.” As he spoke, Gordie was doing the thing he thought Information Men should do, darting his eyes around the room and looking for things. For clues, although what they might be, Fool had no idea. His room was tiny, as all theirs were, and usually contained little other than his bed, a table, a small set of open-­faced drawers, a rail for his smock shirts and trousers, and a tiny bookcase that held no books except for his Information Man’s Guide to the Rules and Offices of Hell.

Today, however, it also contained the feather.

Gordie saw it as Fool sat up fully and took the canister from his colleague’s hand. The younger man’s mouth fell open and his hands dropped to his sides and Fool smiled despite himself, despite the early morning and the lack of sleep, because Gordie looked, for the shortest moment, like a child, a thing of innocence and joy. There was awe on his face, and his skin looked clean and smooth, youthful, his eyes opening wide.

The feather was lying on the top shelf of the bookcase, alongside the Guide and Fool’s gun, and it was beautiful. Curved, the shaft and barbs gleaming, it was perhaps a foot long and whiter than bone and it shivered lightly as Gordie walked toward it and reached out.

“Where . . . ?” he started, and then stopped loosely. “Where . . . ,” he started again and then, again, stopped. Fool didn’t reply. He looked at the feather and his eyes watered mildly, as though the brightness of the previous day had returned to the room for a moment.

“It was a gift,” said Fool, “from one of the angels.” Even saying it made him feel foolish, little silly Fool, because in Hell no one received gifts.

“Can I?” asked Gordie and Fool nodded. His colleague lifted the feather, gasped slightly, and turned to Fool.

“It’s beautiful, like Summer,” he said and then started, glancing down at the feather with a look on his face that Fool thought was almost suspicion.

“Yes,” Fool replied. What else was there to say? Gordie was still holding the feather and suddenly, sharply, he wanted him to put it down, to let it alone, so that he could pick it back up himself. He took another sip of his coffee and nodded at the tube.

“A blue?”

“A blue!” said Gordie, the excitement coming back to his voice. He placed the feather back on the bookcase and twisted the cap off the tube, emptying out the roll of paper from within.

“Let’s see what we’ve got,” said Fool. “Let’s see what Hell wants to show us today.”

The body bobbed facedown in the water about six feet out from the shore, snagged on a clump of branches and leaves. It spun as it bobbed, caught in eddies that sent the water at the lake’s edge into choppy arrhythmia. Despite the dark oiliness of Solomon Water, it was obvious that the naked corpse was human; its skin was pale and torn, hanging in loose ribbons that exposed the darker meat of muscles and flesh.

“I saw it on my way to work,” the man by Fool was saying. “I mean, I saw the flash as I passed the lake, but I didn’t see the body until a few minutes later.”

“The flash?” asked Fool.

“There was a blue flash, I was up on the road and I saw a flash from down here, but I couldn’t see what it was because of the trees. It was a blue flash, and then lots of blue light went up into the sky. I came down here to see what it was.”

“Do you normally check out the things you see on your way to work?” asked Fool.

“If there’s a chance that it might be a Fallen,” replied the man. “It was a blue flash, I’ve told you. I thought it might have been a Fallen and I could claim it as mine. But it was only a body.”

Ah yes, thought Fool. This is only a body, so it’s not important, just a dead human, but it could have been a Fallen. Finding a Fallen was rumored to be a way of guaranteeing an Elevation, of escaping Hell’s grip. “You must have been disappointed,” said Fool. The man, whose name Fool had already lost but which would be in Gordie’s notebook, tensed, hearing Fool’s irritation.

“Look, I’m sorry he’s dead, but people die all the time, every day, don’t they? We’re never safe, are we? It’s not unusual, is it? And I’ve missed work waiting for you, and I’ll lose food for missing a day. At least I waited.”

“True,” said Fool, unable to disagree with anything the man had said. There were murders every day and every night in Hell, too many to count, more than they could ever hope to investigate. Most went unreported except for the details in the canisters that fell from the pneumatic pipes, wrapped in red ribbon or thread, which Fool normally read and then marked with a “DNI” stamp for Did Not Investigate before putting them back into a canister and firing them up the pipe, sending them on to Elderflower. The only reason he was here now was that the Bureaucracy had registered the blue flash and had also wondered about the possibility of it being a Fallen. The canister had been blue ribbon–­wrapped, and they had standing orders to investigate any of those that came through as a priority; it was in his Guide. Blue canisters arrived irregularly, and in all Fool’s time in Hell, over five years now, there had never been a Fallen and he suspected there never would be. The rebel angels were already here, and the only ones left in Heaven were surely the followers and the trusted now, the arms of fury like Balthazar and of mercy like Adam; none of them would fall.

“We need the body,” said Fool to Gordie, turning away from the man at his side, focus shifting, “before the things in there take him.”...

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Verlag
DOUBLEDAY & CO
Erscheinungsdatum
2015
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385539347
ISBN 13 
9780385539340
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
304
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Verantwortliche Person
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