Detective Inspector Chen is back! The Snake Agent returns in The Shadow Pavilion, the fourth Detective Inspector Chen novel from Liz Williams. When Chen's partner, the demon Seneschal Zhu Irzh, disappears, along with Chen's wife and Inari's guardian badger, Chen must enlist all of his allies and assets in order to locate them! From the strange streets of Singapore Three to the rough and tumble world of Bollywood, where money flows fast and emotions flare even faster; from the realms of the Celestial to the haunts of the Infernal and all the spaces in-between, The Shadow Pavilion delivers the thrills, excitement, and near-future occult action fans have come to expect.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
The fourth Det. Insp. Chen mystery (after 2007's Precious Dragon) adds a bit of Bollywood to the high-stakes intrigues of Celestials and demons in Williams's clever mix of Chinese folklore and police procedural. Chen, of Singapore Three, is the city's liaison officer... between Earth and Hell and Heaven. His latest set of troubles starts with the disappearance of his partner, the demon Zhu Irzh, along with Chen's wife's badger familiar. Then Chen learns that someone has hired the bigendered demon assassin Lord Lady Seijin to murder Mhara, the new Emperor of Heaven, and that a rising Bollywood star is actually a tigress demon escaped from the harem of the demon who's trying to steal Zhu Irzh's fiancée. The plot zips along via short, tightly written chapters, growing more and more intricate with each scene. Williams seamlessly blends the occult with modern issues like feminism and illegal immigration to create a thoroughly original fantasy. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Worth the long wait for it to arrive,
By
This review is from: The Shadow Pavilion: A Detective Inspector Chen Novel (Detective Inspector Chen Novels) (Hardcover)
I find this whole series difficult to review because they are so very different from most everything else out there. Suffice to say these books are surreal adventures in a near future Singapore with excursions into Chinese heaven and hell (and this time the Indian one as well) with demons and gods from both Chinese and Hindu mythology present in the real world. This particular entry should be read in sequence but is very rewarding since we see much more of Inari and Badger and learn something of them. Both are much braver than we thought they would be. The story divides into two pieces before rejoining into one interconnected conclusion.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Nice entry in the series,
By Son75 (Paris France) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Shadow Pavilion: A Detective Inspector Chen Novel (Detective Inspector Chen Novels) (Hardcover)
If you liked the previous volumes of this series, you'll like this one too. The relationships between the various main characters as well as the characters themselves evolved and at the end, Liz Williams opened up the perspective of what can or will come along quite interestingly.
Not a good starting point however since there are a lot of references to people and events in the previous books. I'm waiting impatiently for the next book that should come out in April 2010.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Is Hell Heaven?,
By Crusty Critic "Crusty" (Bay Area) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Shadow Pavilion: A Detective Inspector Chen Novel (Detective Inspector Chen Novels) (Paperback)
Liz Williams constructs delightful worlds, whether sort of real, like Singapore Three, or unreal, like the Chinese Heaven, and the Indian and Chinese Hells, and then populates them with sly characters who stand in for the entire range of human folly and goodness. Once again Inspector Chen, the demon Zhu Irzh, Chen's demon wife Inari, Zhu's tiger demon/industrialist fiancé Jhai Tserai, and this time Inari's familiar, the badger/tea kettle, do battle with the forces of Heaven and Hells, trying to prevent the murder of the Lord of Heaven. Mixed in are subplots involving Indian Hell with truly catty tiger demons and Bollywood, and an attempt to redo the mission statement of Chinese Heaven, which, like all "strategic realignments," generates some fierce resistance. Williams knows people (and demons) deep down in their messy selves, full of rationalizations, self aggrandizement, and fantasies overlaid on the reality (or Heaven, or Hell) around them.
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