The Consultant

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.

Review

An intriguing premise, cleverly executed, makes for a brilliant read. For The Consultant, a killer who never meets his victims, it all starts to go wrong when he's told to kill someone he knows. Darkly funny, with a fascinating protagonist, it's excellent! -- Guy Morpuss, author of Five Minds and Black Lake Manor

The Consultant is not only a hugely entertaining book, it's a clever book. As the morally ambiguous consultant goes about his business of arranging natural deaths to streamline corporate restructuring, he offers readers his razor-sharp observations on consumerism, capitalism and what it means to feel anonymous. It's also damn funny -- M. W. Craven

An epic satire of society and power, The Consultant charms and shocks, luring you in to its sizzling plot with no mercy, until you're petrified of how it can possibly end. A blistering indictment of our modern world, this thriller will make you question everything. Brilliant -- Eve Smith

About the Author

Im Seong-sun is a writer, the author of ten books. His first novel, The Consultant, was awarded the 2010 Segye Ilbo Literary Award, and his short story 'The Sheeple Wandering a Gallery and Their Predators' won Korea's Young Artist Award. Seong-sun's sci-fi novel Ouroboros earned him the Korean SF Award.

An Seon Jae (aka Brother Anthony of Taizé) was born in England in 1942. He studied at Queen's College, Oxford, before joining the Community of Taizé in 1969. Since 1980, he has been living and teaching in Korea. He took Korean nationality in 1994. He has translated the work of many major contemporary Korean writers into English. In 2015, he was awarded an Honorary MBE.