Hearing that a new Felix Castor book is forthcoming, I'm revisiting this series.

Fix is hired to exorcise a disturbing apparition at an archive. In the process, he uncovers multiple crimes, from petty theft to torture and human trafficking. And someone has sent a succubus to kill him.

Michael Kramer's performance is flawless. Extra points for pronouncing "mischievous" correctly! ( )

This series feels very similar to the Dresden Files but I liked this one more.
Onto the complaining.
It suffers from a bad case of Asshole all over the place. There doesn't seem to be a single decent human being apart from Felix and maybe Juliet later on.
Everyone is jumping to conclusions about Felix's involvement, blaming Felix or just generally being a dick for no reason.
It got on my nerves by the second book. The entire plot relies on nobody listening to a single word that the mc has to say or everything would unravel immediately.
Furthermore, the mc has very little impact in the happenings in general except as being a kind of involuntary catalyst for events to unravel. Sometimes it feels like he is just a lens through which we see the story developing while he himself is constantly crippled by one thing or another. And even if he actively affects the course of the story it frequently is more by dumb luck than anything else.

I couldn't get on board with the entire worldbuilding around the "ghosts are real" thing either. It seems absurd to me that something that obvious wouldn't have gotten formal acknowledgement and regulations by governments decades ago. I just couldn't stretch my willing suspension of disbelief that far for long. The bigger world around the story just didn't hold together in my mind. ( )

It was alright and the world isnt bad. I just wanted to be wowed and that never happened ( )

This feels like the first book in an excellent series -- one of those pivotal books (in the sense that there is a pivot in the book where the main character finds a new path) that I think will lead to good things. Pretty stark, gritty, chilling, and all ghost, all the time. I'm interested to read more, but I might slow down if they are all so grim. ( )

'The Devil You Know' has a lot to recommend it: great world-building, a twisty plot, a fresh take on the supernatural and a strong sense of place.

I liked Carey's take on the ways in which the dead return and the impact it had on everyday life, not least of which was to provide a living for freelance exorcists like Castor. I was impressed by his re-imaging of Loup Garou, making them scary and deeply repulsive and by the idea that Castor's exorcism depended on music rather than the Catholic bell, book and candle ritual. I particularly liked the way the supernatural world was grounded by and integrated with the very human depravities of organised crime and people trafficking and that the action all occurred in a London that I recognised, making it easier to believe in.

At this point, I would normally be recommending 'The Devil You Know' to anyone who would listen and wondering how long it would be before I could get to the next book in the series. Instead, I'm wondering whether pr not to bother with the next book.

What got in the way of this becoming a book that I'd recommend?

Michael Kramer

Well, firstly it was the choice of narrator. For reasons best known to themselves, the publishers picked Michael Kramer as the narrator. He's a fine narrator with more than a hundred audiobooks to his name but he was entirely the wrong choice for this book.

'The Devil You Know' is a first-person account by Felix Castor. Felix is English. He's a long-term resident of London, although we know he originally came from somewhere a couple of hundred miles north. The plot is entirely London-centric and is full of local references and observations of English culture and class. So why pick an American as the narrator? Were there no English narrators available?

When I first started listening to the book, I struggled to place Castor's origins and class. His vowels were all over the place. I realised what was bothering me when, in the first chapter, Kramer narrated the London AtoZ as the London 'Eh thru Zee'. No Englishman would ever say zee when reading a zed. The problem isn't that that Kramer's English accent is awful but rather that it's only almost right. To me, this is more distracting than having the narration in a straight American accent. It produces an Uncanny Valley kind of dissonance that becomes more disturbing the longer you're exposed to it.

I'd get used to it but I found that all the taken-for-granted information that a character's accent would normally give me about their class and level of education was blurred or conflicted this what the text told me. Then he'd completely mispronounce something (like describing a boy as sniffing glue from an A S D A bag. For a moment, I didn't know what that was, then I realised he meant an ASDA bag. ASDA is the UK's second-largest supermarket chain. No English person would treat it as an acronym) and I'd be thrown out of the story.

So, if I do continue with the series, I'll be reading the ebook version.

The second problem is Felix Castor himself. Maybe it was the distortion of the accent but I couldn't get a clear fix on what made Castor tick. I could see that I was meeting him at his nadir when he was broken and isolated and in denial about the nature of the work he did but I couldn't picture what an unbroken Castor looked like and I couldn't work up much empathy for him. He was clever, brave and persistent. He was also a pain in the arse, totally up himself and had been emotionally distant for so long that he couldn't hear the echo of his own feelings. But apart from that... Maybe a character that annoys me that much is worth learning more about? Maybe not.

I'm going to give it a while before deciding whether to read more of this series.

If you'd like to hear Michael Kramer's narration for yourself, click on the SoundCloud link below.


https://soundcloud.com/hachetteaudio/the-devil-you-know-by-mike-carey

( )