The Devil You Know

The Devil You Know, by Mike Carey *****


I received this book from a wonderful person. This is the first book in Mike Carey's Felix Castor series. I thoroughly enjoy this book. there are zombies, ghosts, werwolves (a form of undead spirits in Felix's world) and demons inhabiting London alongside regular humans. Felix Castor is a ghost exorcist. Some people don't like him, some people do. He is hired to exorcise a ghost from a building that holds archives, but things don't go so smoothly. Felix ends up in danger, and finds that he wants to solve the mystery of why this ghost is a ghost afterall. Mike Carey is an extremely good writer. The dialogue is snappy, there are many twists and turns, and the main character is not a perfect male speciman, but a guy who makes mistakes and can admit them.
The book has very strong mystery elements, and is one of the few books that didn't have me saying, come on! figure it out already! to the character. I liked his original take on the undead, and the way the characters interact with each other.

I'm looking forward to reading the next book in this series, which was also provided to me by a very sweet person.... (thanks sweet person!).

If I wasn't so tired I would put up links- I still might at a later date.

If you like paranormal mysteries, thick books, and down to earth characters...even the undead characters, you'll enjoy this one. One challenge I had (being an American) was reading the British idioms - which I plan to look up for a wider understanding. This wasn't an irritating challenge, just something that made me want to learn a little more about British slang and word usage- it's rare that a book makes me want to actually learn something, so this is a plus for me.

Thanks to Very Sweet Person, and to winning a book from the SciFiGuy blog, I also own the second and third book in the Felix series. I know there are more, and based on this book I'm very sure that I will at some point be buying the others.