The Consultant by Seong-sun Im, An Seon Jae (translator)

SHORTLISTED FOR THE CWA DAGGER FOR CRIME FICTION IN TRANSLATION 2024.

The award-winning Korean smash-hit crime novel available for the first time in English-a darkly funny thriller for lovers of Dexter and Severance. You can call it murder if you want. I call it restructuring.

The Consultant is very good at his job. He creates simple, elegant solutions for… restructuring. But the thing is that structures never really change-it's just the parts that disappear. The “natural deaths” he curates have been a medicine replaced here, a mechanism jammed there. Everyone can accept a stroke of fate. And how much more immoral is it, really, than marketing cigarettes or mining fossil fuels? Until his next “client” turns out to be someone the Consultant not only knows but cares about deeply, and for the first time, he begins to question his role in the vast, anonymous Company. As he starts to understand the real scope of their work, he's forced to reckon with how far he'll go to escape it-and how far they'll go to stop him. The electrifying novel from award-winning Korean thriller writer Im Seong-sun, The Consultant combines nail-biting crime fiction with a take-down of global corporate life and the dark underbelly of workplace politics.