A review by shalini_rasamdaa
The Devil's Detective by Simon Kurt Unsworth

adventurous challenging dark sad fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I love detective mysteries, I love fantasy and spec-fic, so when those two are combined I will 
absolutely feel some type of way so I was positively biased towards this book even before I started. 
The Devil’s Detective takes place entirely in Hell, and our hero Thomas Fool is an Information Man for Hell (roughly a sort of policeman). His job is to receive crime cases, and mark it as “Do Not Investigate, until The Case(™) arrives that leaves him questioning everything he knows. Of course it’s a murder case, and the setting has such a noir vibe that you’re unsurprised to learn that the victims are mainly sex workers.
David Rintool is a great narrator and brings Thomas Fool’s character to life (there are places where he gets overwrought and it feels unnatural but it’s all good) and Unsworth’s writing is grimly efficient and descriptive, clinically describing the horrifying (and really, really viscerally disgusting) realities of life in Hell. Can’t help feeling sorry for those people, even though if they’re in Hell, there’s a reason they’re there, I mean some of those people I felt sorry for might have tortured a dog to death, so there’s that conflict. 
I was hooked completely from the first line to the last, even though this story doesn’t use groundbreaking mystery devices (apart from the setting) and  it was obvious from the start who is pulling the puppet strings and who the villain is, but to have it all laid out was still an exciting ride. Fantastic worldbuilding - just when you think Hell couldn’t get worse, it does. And man, the tragedy of it all. Looking forward to what the Fool gets up to in the next story.

 
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