GoodReads meta-data is 374 pages, rated 3.92 by 2710 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: Whoosh!
It had to happen! McKinsey management has made it to the afterlife, and there, after a 360-degree review accompanied by all the mod clichés of corporate-speak, Satan’s performance has been found unsatisfactory. St Peter has mined the data on his computer tablet and there is no denying the optics of the spreadsheets: things in Hell are bad, but no thanks to Satan. Well, things are so bad many condemned souls cannot even get into Hell so long are the poorly managed entrance lines, but must abandon even that hope. Yet that is one of Satan’s core competencies.
His KPIs are no longer scalable, indeed, they are no longer visible. No amount of thinking outside the box, colouring outside the lines, corporate values, empowerment, leverage, over the wall(ness), bench-marking, peeling the onion, breaking down the silos, pushing the envelope, increasing the bandwidth, paradigm shifting, data-driving, closing the loop, low-hanging fruit, return on investment, SWOTing, or reaching out can take Hell down to the next level. When asked if his management of Hell represents best practice, well, what is Satan to say? Who’s is better?
After the usual collegial backbiting, some of it literal, Satan appeals this decision because St Peter is sending too many souls to Hell for parking in disabled zones, DVD copying, nose picking, unreturned library books, and the like. But the review committee to hear his appeal, packed with angels unlikely to be sympathetic with the Lord of Darkness, is implacable: Satan is being out-placed. G-o-n-e.
He is condemned to live on earth as an earthling! This is, indeed, for him a fate worse than death. Hell is certainly other people, vide Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos.
And where is he sent as an alternative to Hell? Birmingham England that is where. A place, it seems, where there is no respect for evil incarnate, and it is forever cold and wet.
There he adjusts slowly to the new circumstances, and seeks out Satanists to worship himself, but finds them useless poseurs who have never pitch-forked writhing souls into the Lake of Eternal Fire. He’s got nothing to learn from them. Then by chance he finds his métier in Heavy Metal music and for a time is a sin-sation. But even that grows boring: shouting damnation at dunderheads who pay for the privilege is fun and profitable but the amusement wanes. That low boredom threshold may have been his problem in managing Hell.
In an effort to fit in with his new neighbours Satan prepares a dinner party, like nothing anyone has ever had before. (Did I mention that he had a part-time job – more of a hobby to remind him of the old days – at a mortuary?) Then there was the flamethrower, he does like fire, for the crème brulée. It did not end well.
In time he discovers his dismissal was rigged in a management coup and finds unlikely allies (including Jeanne d’Arc) to put things back to rights, er, well, wrongs.
It is a cackle and since there is a murder (followed by a resurrection) it is classified as a krimi above. Well, two of each to be technical.
When we were planning a trip to Birmingham I found a few novels set in Britain’s second largest city, this among them. Though that trip was cancelled, by then I had the book sample on the Kindle and when I started reading it, there was no stopping. It is the first title in a series and I have already finished the second which has more twists and turns than a dean at a budget meeting and started the third in which eternally young and bored Jeanne goes on an away mission. In the fourth, yes I have read that one, too, we learn where work-weary demons go for a quiet life. And I am now up to volume seven, ah hmm, eight.