Rec: Snake Agent (fantasy) Snake Agent by Liz Williams - having already recommended one of her other books (Darkland), I've now got around to reading the book that got me there in the first place, the first of a series featuring Detective Inspector Chen. The books are set in Singapore Three (a franchise city in the far east) where Heaven and Hell are easily reachable from the human world. Chen is a police officer, whose duties see him travelling easily between the realms, much to the dismay of his colleagues.
In Snake Agent, Chen finds himself working alongside his equivalent from Hell - Zhu Irzh is a demon working for the Ministry of Lust, and like Chen he is interested in finding out why numbers of young girls are dying unexpectedly and then appearing in ghost brothels rather than making their way to Heaven. Zhu Irzh is cursed with a conscience (something of a liability for a demon whose job is promoting, rather than controlling, Vice). Alongside all of this, Chen is trying to deal with the repercussions of his recent marriage, to a demon who escaped a less satisfactory marriage by fleeing to Singapore Three, and the two storylines become inexorably intertwined.
It's clear that Williams knows her stuff in terms of setting up a convincing universe - this isn't a book you can skim, or at least not without losing a lot of the value of her storytelling. There are already a number of other books in the series, with more on the way, and I look forward to reading them. The next book in the series is The Demon and the City.