Procession of the Dead
D. B. Shan
312 pages
published in 2008

Never heard of D. B. Shan before I found this in the library, but the book looked interesting and that's what libraries are for, aren't they; discovering new authors. Judging from the back cover blurb this seemed to be a crime thriller with some fantastical elements and for once that's what it turned out to be. It was interesting to for once go into a novel without preconceptions, without knowning anything about the author or the books he has written.

Procession of the Dead is a book about a young gangster called Capac Raimi, coming to the City to be an apprentice to his uncle, one of the small time crooks running part of the underworld. Capac has higher ambitions than that though, hoping to catch the eye of the Cardinal, the man who runs all of the underworld. The Cardinal is the City and the City is the Cardinal: "if the Cardinal pinched the cheeks of his arse, the walls of the city bruised". And Capac does catch his eye, at the cost of his uncle's life.

Whisked away to Party Central, the Cardinal's headquarters, he is introduced to the man himself who takes him onboard for a glowing career in ...insurance selling? Wannabe gangsters have to start somewhere and the Cardinal's legal enterprises are just as big as his less than legal enterprises. Despite this lowly beginning, Capac is destined for greater things, being drawn in the Cardinal's inner circle of confidants. But something's wrong. Some of them disappear without trace and worse, nobody seems to remember them. Is that just a measure of the Cardinal's power, or is there something more sinister behind this -- and what does it have to do with Capac himself?

Procession of the Dead starts as a gangster story, turning fantastical as Capac finds out the truth about the Cardinal, his henchmen and himself. The combination of the two worlds is not entirely convincing, the gangster and fantasy elements clashing somewhat. One part of that is the setting. On the one hand there's the City, carefully kept generic and symbolic, but there are occasional refences to real world things. It's all a bit sloppy.

All in all this was entertaining enough, but nothing special. Interesting enough that I might read the sequel, if the library has it.