The Consultant

The darkly funny, satirical Korean thriller

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 consumerism, capitalism and what it means to feel anonymous' M.W. Craven
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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 begins 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 first 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 searing social criticism to present a searing take-down of global corporate life.