Department Zero

By Paul Crilley

THE END OF THE UNIVERSE IS ONLY A HOP, SKIP, AND SLIGHT STUMBLE-THROUGH-A-WORMHOLE AWAY
 
Harry Priest just wants to make sure his ex-wife doesn’t take away his visitation rights, and his dead-end job cleaning up crime scenes for the past ten years isn’t doing him any favors.
 
But when Harry attends what he thinks is a routine death, he stumbles onto a secret multiverse of alternate realities all reachable through universe-hopping gates. Policing these worlds is Havelock Graves, the Interstitial Crime Department’s top agent for ten years running (according to him).  When Harry accidentally messes with the ICD crime scene, Graves and his team are demoted as low as they can go: Department Zero. They’re recruiting Harry too—not because he charmed them, but because he just might hold the key to saving the universe . . . and getting their old jobs back.
 
To do this, Graves and his team set out to solve the crime that lost them their jobs.  A crime that involves a cult planning to hunt down and steal the fabled Spear of Destiny in order to free the Great Old One Cthulhu from his endless sleep in the Dreamlands. (Because that’s another thing Harry soon finds out. Everything H. P. Lovecraft wrote is true. Like, everything.)
 
The team will have to fight its way through realities filled with Martian technology and evade mad priests (Harry’s favorite kind) in a realm of floating landmasses where magic really exists.
 
And Harry has to do it all in time to say good night to his daughter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jan 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9781633882027

Reviews for Department Zero

[john_warner-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

"The Elder Gods created the Old Ones, but imprisoned them when they got a bit too...bitey. The Old Ones are locked away in the Dreamlands -- also known as the Absolute Elsewhere -- but their minions are always trying to free them." (p. 249-251)H.P. Lovecraft fans may recognize this sentence as a description of his Cthulhu mythos. Not only does the author play homage to H.P. Lovecraft but he also recognizes the "Men-in-Black" and Matrix film series and film director Christopher Nolan's Inception.Harry Priest, former "biomedical remediation specialist", is recruited by his future partner, Havelock Graves, and the covert Interstitual Crime Department (ICD), when one of his routine crime scene cleanups turns out to involve the invasion of nightmarish creatures from parallel universes. Harry, a man who dreamed once of being a policeman, believes he is being recruited because of certain law enforcement skills, but Graves actually believe that he might just be the key to saving the existence of the multiverse as well as his job.The ICD has discovered a plot of a religious cult led by the fanatic Nyarlathotep to steal the Spear of Destiny, the lance believed to have pierced Jesus's side, and a crimson jewel, which they will use to awaken Cthulhu, which will destroy the multiverses. Graves hopes that Priest and the others in Department Zero, the lowest recesses of ICD where screw-ups find themselves assigned, will be able to stop Nyarlathotep, save the multiverses, and restore him to his former, more prestigious, position in the organization. The author, Paul Crilley, has repackaged themes from several popular cultural films into an entertaining paranormal suspenseful tale. The humorous banter between Harry and Graves and the never-ending action keeps the reader turning the pages making this book a quick read since one wants to see what lies on the next page.