If you were drawn to Thomas Fool trudging through Hell's bureaucracy to untangle ritualistic murders and fend off meddling demons and angels, you'll love how Inspector Tyador Borlú hunts a killer across the "crosshatched" streets of Besžel and Ul Qoma. In The City & the City, the act of seeing is policed as fiercely as any demon—Breach is as terrifying and unknowable as Unsworth's higher powers—and the procedural grind has the same tense, fatalistic snap as Fool's casework.

If the flayed corpses and pitiless violence of The Devil's Detective grabbed you, Barker's return to Hell will feel like coming home. Occult investigator Harry D'Amour tracks the Hell Priest (Pinhead) through a labyrinthine underworld where skin and souls are currency. The set pieces—ritual slaughters, baroque torture chambers, a literal descent into Hell—echo the same brutal stakes Thomas Fool faces when his murder case drags him before powers that treat humans as meat.

If Hell's industrial districts, ministries, and cruel rules enthralled you while Thomas Fool chased his killer through smoke and ash, New Crobuzon will swallow you whole. From the Remade to the corrupt Parliament and the nightmare slake-moths, Perdido Street Station builds a city with the same visceral density and menace—every alley has politics, every institution its own teeth—while a desperate investigation spirals into dealings with powers as indifferent as angels and demons.

If you liked how Thomas Fool's case kept curdling into the uncanny—human rules warped by inhuman authorities—Finch hits the same nerve. Detective John Finch works murders in Ambergris under the boot of the gray caps, whose fungal tech remakes bodies and buildings. The interrogations, dead drops, and betrayals play like Unsworth's grim procedural beats, but every clue seeps with weird biology, as destabilizing as Fool's encounters with angelic and demonic forces.

If you connected with Thomas Fool—an Information Man trying to do right in a place built to crush it—you'll click with Warden, a disgraced ex-cop and drug dealer pulled into the hunt for a murdered child. Low Town leans hard into moral compromise, back-alley informants, and police who are as bad as the monsters, echoing the way Fool must wheedle favors from demons and navigate hostile superiors just to keep the bodies from piling up.