The Devil's Evidence

by Simon Kurt Unsworth

Overview

Thomas Fool is a detective from Hell—literally. Having survived the wrath of both angel and demon, and still without memory of his life on earth, Fool is currently spending his damnation as a bureaucrat heading up the Information Office of Hell. But when mysterious fires begin spooking higher-ups in the Bureaucracy—homicidal arson, it's believed—and a series of unexplained murders plagues Heaven, Fool is dispatched north to investigate.

But Heaven is not what Fool imagines. In fact, it's not so different from Hell. And friction between the two afterworlds is only beginning to mount as Fool conducts his investigation. The Devil's Evidence is a thrilling ride through the spiritual realm, and a welcome return for the dead's most endearing private eye.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804172936
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/13/2017
Series:	Thomas Fool Series
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Simon Kurt Unsworth was born in the UK in Manchester and now lives in a rambling house in Cumbria with his children and the writer Rosie Seymour. He is the author of The Devil’s Detective and many short stories, including the collection Quiet Houses.

Read an Excerpt

PROLOGUE

It was a building, and it had burned.

“How many does this make it?”

Fool ignored the question, lifting his hands to his face and rubbing, and the skin of his palms smelled of soot and scorched flesh.

“I don’t know,” he said eventually, dropping his hands from the exhaustion that his head had become. How many fires have there been in the previous days and weeks? he wondered, and then stopped wondering and tried to remember. I should know, he thought, I’m an Information Man. I should act like one and not like the Fool I was. So, how many? Certainly five, when he sifted through his mind he found that many, but possibly more. Almost certainly more. He was tired, the images in his head jumbling, blurring together, at least five but more, definitely more. Six, maybe seven, or even eight. Buildings, burned and damaged.

“It’s eight,” said Marianne at his side, and Fool turned to her, focusing, pulling himself back to now, looking at her with his officer’s eyes. She was young, only several months old despite her adulthood, freshly harvested from Limbo and made into one of the new Information Men, and she was already beginning to understand her role. She was already good.

“Eight, yes,” he said, “this is the eighth. And the links between them?”“Fire,” Marianne replied immediately, “obviously. Fires that have been set, that haven’t happened accidentally.”

“And?” It was unfair, really. Fool didn’t have any great insight; even after the previous seven investigations, he was simply hoping that her eyes might have seen the ground differently than his own. She was smart and sharp, and only rarely did she act around him as the other human Information Men did, with that irritating deference. Now, however, she looked at him without speaking, unable to answer, shoulders hunching slightly into a shrug. Sighing, he turned away from her and looked at the burned thing at his front and thought back, over the whole fucking smoking mess of the investigation. Eight fires, eight things burned to soot and spindle and ragged chaos, and what did he know?

Mr. Tap crouched in the corner and watched, impassive.

Fool’s officers, his troops as the Bureaucracy now insisted on calling them, were distracting him, pushing and poking and talking. Each time he tried to focus on the details the sound of them shifted his attention, or one of them would amble into his eye line and he would lose the threads that were starting to form behind his eyes. They weren’t helping, weren’t finding clues, assuming there were any to find; they were simply creating more chaos, more disorder, blurring the narrative the building was trying to tell him. “Out,” he said finally, waving his hand at the door.“Sir?” asked one of the demons, its black uniform hanging awkwardly over a body that appeared to be formed solely of twists and kinks. Fool could hear the disgust in its voice. This little demon, part of a lineage of the infliction of pain and suffering, was taking orders from a human, and it hated it; hated it. Never mind, it would learn, or it would be taken away. That was how things were now.

“Out,” said Fool again, this time more loudly, jabbing his finger at the doorway. “All of you. Wait outside.”

Fool watched as his Men left, their feet and claws leaving puffs of ash behind them, weapons and bags clanking, until they were finally gone and an almost-silence seeped back in around him. Only Mr. Tap remained, still in the corner, still crouched and watching. Its skin seemed slick in the hazy light, its mouth open and tasting the air. Fool, as instructed, tried to ignore it and turned back into the dead structure and tried to read its corpse.

The problem now was the same as that first time, when he had been sent to an outbuilding burned away to shadow and grime. He saw it, it was there around him and in front of him, but the fires made things jumbled and he didn’t know how to investigate them; he’d never had to before. There was little or no information here, nothing to link the burned places besides the fires themselves. Fool understood, to some degree anyway, how to investigate the deaths of humans and even the deaths of demonkind, but the burning of buildings? He didn’t know where to start.

Editorial Reviews

"A grim yet terribly fun version of Hell. . . . [Unsworth's] prose resembles a Baroque-era Caravaggio painting of a Grand Guignol landscape of filth and depravity." —The Rumpus

"Unsworth has built a very horrible, yet believable universe with characters who you can hate as well as root for. While you don’t need to read the first novel to enjoy the second in the series, we really do recommend you start at the beginning. There’s a lot to take in and a great deal of character development to enjoy. A real page turner." —Starburst Magazine

"Strange and beautiful. . . . Unsworth captures the tone and weary, wounded voice of the best noir detectives." —Fantasy Literature

"Very clever and very sharply written—an obvious crossover with appeal to both mystery and science-fiction readers." —Booklist

"Unsworth's conception of a spiritual universe where deeper understanding may itself be the greatest curse is as nuanced and ingenious as his depiction of "poor little Fool," perhaps the most oddly endearing sleuth to come along in years...Thomas Fool will return, with more respect from readers than from his spiritual jailers. It's less a whodunit than a ripsnorter, with an emphasis on the ripping. Or maybe the snorting." —Kirkus

From the Publisher

2016-04-13
Thomas Fool, Satan's top crime solver, is back, and, more than ever, you wonder what awful deeds this poor wretch did in life to deserve such a relentlessly dreadful calling. This follow-up to Unsworth's debut novel, The Devil's Detective (2015), finds Hell's "Information Man" once again dealing with wanton, inexplicable, and unauthorized violence visited upon the Eternally Condemned. In this case, it's a series of fires—"Six, maybe seven, or even eight"—that have fatally burned living souls all over the netherworld. (And yes, Hell is notorious for fire. But if you paid attention to this novel's immediate predecessor, you're aware that these days, there are many more awful things that can happen to you Down There than being roasted on a spit 24/7.) As Fool is struggling to determine a pattern for this homicidal arson, his masters dispatch him and a delegation of demons to Heaven, aka the Not-Nearly-As-Bad-Place-Up-Yonder, where, hard as it may be to believe, there are also a handful of unexplained murders that may or may not be linked to the ones down below. Despite being disdained by Heaven's angelic elite while being tortured by Hell's roughneck "Evidence" specialists, Fool doggedly presses on with his inquiry, finding almost as many distressing similarities between Heaven and Hell as he does unsettling contrasts. Both, for instance, have bureaucracies that are arbitrary and shortsighted in dispensing judgment. "There are hierarchies even [in Heaven]," Fool thinks to himself. "Even in the place of perfection there are those who are more powerful, more perfect." Soon, both hierarchies are goaded from uneasy détente to total war, and Fool finds himself running out of time and resources to figure out who, or what, is behind this unholy maelstrom. Unsworth's conception of a spiritual universe where deeper understanding may itself be the greatest curse is as nuanced and ingenious as his depiction of "poor little Fool," perhaps the most oddly endearing sleuth to come along in years. The scales are tipped a tad more toward gaudy savagery and gratuitous cruelty than toward more intellectual digressions and plot twists. Still, one suspects Thomas Fool will return, with more respect from readers than from his spiritual jailers. It's less a whodunit than a ripsnorter, with an emphasis on the ripping. Or maybe the snorting.

Kirkus Reviews