Sometimes work can be murder.... In this sharp, satirical Korean thriller, the Consultant provides the ultimate solution to problematic employees

SHORTLISTED FOR THE CWA DAGGER FOR CRIME FICTION IN TRANSLATION 2024 'It's a clever book ... [Im Seong-sun] offers readers his razor-sharp observations on consumer capitalism and what it means to feel anonymous' M. W. Craven ------------------- Sometimes work can be murder... The Consultant is very good at his job. He creates simple, elegant, effective solutions for... restructuring. Nothing obvious or messy. Certainly nothing anyone would ever suspect as murder. The 'natural deaths' he plans have always gone well: a medicine replaced here, a mechanism jammed there. His performance reviews are excellent. And it's not as though he knows these people. Until his next 'customer' turns out to be someone he not only knows but cares about, and for the first time, he begins to question the role he plays in the vast, anonymous Company. And as he slowly starts to understand the real scope of their work, he realises just how easy it would be for the Company to arrange one more perfect murder... But how far will he go to escape The Company? And how far will they go to stop him? The electrifying novel from award-winning Korean thriller-writer Im Seong-sun - now in English for the first time - combines the tension of the best crime fiction with sharp social criticism in this searing take-down of global corporate life.

"A spicy and pacy Korean crime novel in translation ... the reader is brought along a thrilling journey that probes the cracks in capitalism by exploring what people would really do for money" - Huffington Post, 23 Brilliant New Books for 2023 To Get Your Reading List Started

"Consultant unfurls from the perspective of a first-person narrator who writes scenarios of perfect crimes. It examines ... the violence of modern anonymity and capitalism" - Readers News

"These facts about Sung-soon Lim might astound you ... Every book of his boasts a drastically different sensibility, prose, and subject matter. His world building is unparalleled, his prose precise, and you can see the echo of extensive research that must have gone into the storytelling" - Channel Yes

"This tale of an accidental accomplice to serial murder spellbindingly combines the eerily affectless, morally ambiguous tone of a Patricia Highsmith novel with John Dickson Carr’s fecundity in devising “impossible” crimes" - Telegraph

"[The Consultant] is toweringly the most interesting of the autumn bunch ... beautifully crafted, witty, slick novel has a profound meta-physical basis" - Tablet