Book completed in April 2007

Snake Agent. by Liz Williams (Night Shade Books, 2006)

I only managed one book last month, but it was a pretty darn good one. Snake Agent, is a very solid fantasy hardboiled detective that in feeling is quite reminiscent of George Alec Effinger's Budayeen series, But based in traditional Chinese religion rather than a Third World North Africa of the future. The plotting was good and their was more depth to the characters than I would have expected. The hero's wife, a classic Japanese fox demon, is much more developed than I expected.

I must admit to being a sucker for the genre though, even though this is one of the first examples I have come across. I am a huge fan of Chinese supernatural stories such as those of Pu Song-ling. If you haven't read any I highly recommend you give it a try. As to editions their are quite a few and some of the weirdest stories get left out of many translations. My favorite edition is this rather tacky edition from Beijing Foreign Language Press. There is a new Penguin Classics abridged edition edited by John Minford which Amazon fails to list under Pu, which is rather criminal, would they list the author of Crime and Punishment as Constance Garnett?

[Edit May 2, 2007. Apparently Amazon has a way of updating product details, and they took my suggestion and corrected the author, as messy as the net is, it is nice to see how it can be so easily corrected sometimes.]