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At the Bonnington Archive in London, a young Russian woman haunts the halls, growing more and more agitated as the days go by, until she becomes violent and harms one of the employees. The administrator wants her gone, so he hires a reluctant exorcist named Felix Castor.
Felix doesn’t really want to be an exorcist any longer. He considers it an ill-conceived career because he knows that, one of these days, he’s going to run into something he can’t handle. But a ghost haunting a museum sounds simple and harmless enough—and there’s also that little matter of paying the bills.
At first, Felix thought the ghost had something to do with a shipment of Russian artifacts and old letters, but a thorough search turns up nothing. He can’t even get a psychic feel for who she might be by touching the letters. The employees describe her as all white and shiny, with the top half of her face gone. Some say she wears a veil, others say her face is red except for her mouth, and she slowly fades out the further down her body they look. So he doesn’t even have a clear picture of what she might look like.
When a man named Damjohn shows up with his loup-garou—a human ghost that possesses an animal host—and demands his “cleaning” service, refusing to take no for an answer, things take a turn for the worse. What he thought would be an easy gig turns into something much more sinister, and Felix finds himself investigating a murder while trying to stay alive and outrun a demon that’s been conjured to put him off the case forever.
With The Devil You Know, Mike Carey has written a creepy ghost story, complete with a few surprises and some fresh ideas that you don’t often see in the horror genre. A mixture of the paranormal and an interesting mystery makes this a good read. Don’t expect a fast-moving plot, though. This one plods along until its climatic conclusion, where the truth comes out in an unexpected twist of events.
I found Felix Castor to be a memorable character, and I’d love to visit his world again sometime. Mr. Carey leaves the door open at the end, so there’s no telling what might come crawling in down the road. Though he didn’t really scare me with this book (I’m pretty tough to scare these days), Mike Carey is definitely an author I’d like to pick up again.
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