Everybody Lies in Hell is a detective novel set in a world with no absolute innocents: if you aren't a murderer or accessory, then you've still done something that hurt another person or traumatized someone else. And the result of those actions is Hell. The most self-aware souls live in Personalized Afterlifes modeled after one significant location from their lives but without the best things, if any, about that place, although it is possible to visit another Hell. Other departed souls known as "stragglers" fool themselves into thinking they are still alive and go through empty motions of everyday life in another person's Hell. Injuries never heal, demonic creatures lurk in the shadows, particularly powerful and evil souls invade other people's Hells, and anyone who is killed again, hurt too badly, or (for stragglers) forced to confront the truth about where they descends to a dungeon cell: Fire and Brimstone Hell with nonstop torture at the hands of demons and no possible way to escape or be rescued. And with how long eternity is, it seems like nearly everyone ends up in a dungeon cell eventually.
Hard Boiled Detective Mike Stone continues his trade in Hell, helping other dead people figure out who killed them, why they are in Hell, or what happened back on Earth after they died. During the book, he has three cases to keep him busy. A self-deluding Amoral Attorney wants to find his killer and is convinced that if if he proves he was killed by someone without proper cause to kill him then he can get out of Hell. A secretive young Broken Bird named Ruby wants to learn about her life and her death, with the case taking Stone to dark places. And a brutal warlord is convinced Stone can find a way to escape Hell and orders him to do so…or else.
The original novel was written in 2019 by Dave Zeltersman, who has since explored additional Stone cases with two short stories ("The Ice Lady" and "The Hollywood Hit") collected and published with some of his other works.
Tropes in the Series:
- Believing Their Own Lies: Per the title, few people initially give Stone a straight answer about how they died and/or why they deserve to be damned, and many of them are fooling themselves about what happened until he lays things out for them, and Stone himself has a few self-delusions.
- Clear Their Name: The client in "The Ice Lady" and her lover framed her husband for a robbery and murder they committed. Her sister-law knew the truth and tried to exonerate her brother by making them reveal the truth but ended up killing them instead. The husband died in prison (although he made it to Heaven) and his sister feels she is in Hell more for failing to clear his name than for the crimes she committed trying.
- Confess to a Lesser Crime:
- Stone tells people he went to Hell for accidentally shooting a boy with a stray shot while shooting it out with a hitman. While that really did happen, he suspects what actually damned him is that he abandoned his pregnant girlfriend while knowing that, without him in her life, she would put their baby through a nightmarish childhood, something that did indeed happen and turned out even worse than his pessimistic expectations.
- In "The Hollywood Hit," Charles Hunter claims he was sent to Hell for seducing married women. Mike doubts this, as he has never heard of anyone going to Hell except for things like rape, murder, child abuse, and a few other particularly harmful acts. It turns out Hunter and his agent murdered a rival actor to win a coveted audition.
- Faux Affably Evil: Tyler Harmon may be a damned soul in a dungeon cell, but he does thank Stone for temporarily fighting off the demons torturing him and shows a lot of sympathy while talking about Ruby and her miserable childhood, saying that he'd hoped they could have a better life together and was horrified when she killed their kidnapping victim. It is implied at least some of this was an act or that Tyler is lying to himself, as the man who had Tyler killed says that he suspects Tyler was the actual killer but blamed everything on Ruby and agreed to lure her into a trap in a failed effort to save his own life.
- Motive Misidentification: Stone thinks the killer in "The Hollywood Hit" may have been motivated by the womanizing victim going after his wife or to avenge a murdered associate, but it turns out he was really acting to avoid getting caught Stealing from the Till.
- Summon Bigger Fish: Stone is threatened into taking an impossible task by Al-Zaoud, a damned soul older than almost anyone else in Hell outside of the dungeon cells, who threatens to add Stone to his collection of still-living heads tied to their saddles of his cavalry horde. Stone goes to Nicolas Bratianu for help. Bratianu is a Wallachian prince who has his own army and tortured and slaughtered thousands in religious conflicts and is convinced that he was sent to Hell so he could purify other damned souls by torturing them even worse and (after being convinced not to put Stone in his torture chamber) is delighted at the opportunity to go to work on the worst sinner in Hell. However, Mike eventually learns that it is a dangerous toss-up between which of the two is the bigger fish.
- Surprisingly Happy Ending: Hell is quite the Crapsack World, and Stone enters the Despair Event Horizon upon being threatened with an And I Must Scream fate by Al Zaoud and realizing that his client Ruby is his biological daughter, who went through Hell on Earth at the hands of various guardians and lovers after he abandoned her and then ended up a damned soul after participating in a fatal kidnapping. Then he realizes that everyone is in a Self-Inflicted Hell, and that if he focuses enough on the good things he has done and his potential to do more good, he can turn that private Hell into a Heaven, giving him the power to defeat Al-Zaoud, and ends the book setting out to convince Ruby (and possibly some of the other more woobieish denizens of Hell) to come to the same realization that he had.
- Time Dissonance: The passage of time varies from one Personalized Afterlife to another. Jonah Dudley thinks he has been dead and alone for several centuries while Ruby Jane, who died before him, says it has only been a few years for her, and other people from her life who Stone is convinced did enough to damn themselves to Hell like her ex-boyfriend and foster mother aren’t listed in the phone book of Hell, presumably meaning they haven’t died yet.
- Villains Out Shopping: Mob boss Freddie Cook from "The Hollywood Hit" often hung out with and double-dated with movie star Charles Hunter (whose murder drove Cook into a Roaring Rampage of Revenge) and he has spent his afterlife unsuccessfully trying to arrange a horse race to watch like he did in the old days.