City of Others by Jared Poon: review

4/5 stars on Goodreads

City of Others by Jared Poon

City of Others starts The DEUS Files urban fantasy series. It’s set in Singapore, which isn’t exactly overused in books directed at western markets, and follows DEUS, Division for Engagement of Unusual Stakeholders. It’s a government department whose job it is to keep the supernatural community, the Others, happy and out of sight.

The main character and first-person narrator is Benjamin Toh, middle manager in his early thirties and the leader of a three-person team, four if you count the intern. None of them are regular humans, not that their boss knows it. Mei is a witch, Jimmy a diviner, and the intern is a jinn.

Ben is Gardener, basically a cultivator of Chinese xianxias, but in a very concrete way. Inside him is a huge forest that represent his abilities, memories and powers, which he prunes and grows to have extraordinary powers like healing. Ben is Chinese, an only child of a widowed father with whom he has a rather strained relationship, and gay. He’s a very responsible person who thinks it’s his job to protect everyone, take all the risks and handle everyone’s jobs for them. He’s gotten away with it most of his life and doesn’t see a problem in his way of thinking.

Ben’s plate is overflowing with tasks from handling complaints of the other, organising his team for the sports day, and arranging permits for his childhood best friend’s undead ducklings. Somewhere he needs to find time for the guy he’s been seeing, Adam, and being on time for dinner with his dad for at least once.

But then an impending doom takes precedence. An entire housing estate is vanishing and people there are acting odd. The cause turns out to be a fellow Gardner who is infecting people with his grief, making it spread and gain so much weight the area is sinking into other dimension. Good thing is that Adam turns out to be an expert of this dimension. Bad thing is that the grief is attracting predators that will destroy the entire city. The team faces an impossible task, made even more difficult because Ben is incapable of team work. It’s high time he learns before it’s too late.

This was a delightful series starter. The cast is diverse, setting is fresh, and supernatural different from the usual. The obvious comparison is Black Water Sister by Zen Cho set in Malaysa, and City of Others suffers a little from it. Singapore is culturally, religiously and ethnically diverse, but the various cultures don’t really come to life here. Characters aren’t described, other than a random reference to a person being Chinese, Tamil or Malay, which doesn’t really tell anything to a western reader, and everyone has a western name, which obscures things further. Singapore itself doesn’t really feature either, and the book could be set anywhere.

But the case is interesting, with twists and turns. Ben’s team is good and Adam is great. Ben grows a lot and his life is better at the end of the book than it was at the beginning. And there will be more books in the series too. I’ll definitely read them.