Angelmaker

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Dangling fantasy items are tossed in, but seem gratuitous. Katie’s daughter reporting that the moon comes to talk to her, for example. There are a few more otherworldly gewgaws added here and there, but they serve, mostly, as window-dressing. Alan Hobbes is a distinguished philosophy professor who has been brutally murdered just hours after firing his staff. Of course, he knew he was going to be murdered because everything that happens in life is preordained. After all, he has spent his life lecturing on determinism. This is the first book I've read by the author. I have The Whisper Man on my TBR, but I decided to go first with this newer release. The biggest positive aspect of this book is its dark atmosphere. I have to give the author credit because the story has a really intense atmosphere, and the ambiguity of the plot has contributed greatly to keeping the atmosphere steady and strong throughout the narrative. Love causes people to do stupid things. That does not, she realizes now, make them the wrong things." From this and other comments and actions Polly makes, you get the sense that she might be a little bit mad. (Then again, maybe everyone in this book is.) Psychology aside, this is one woman I want on my side.

Thank you to Celadon Books and NetGalley who provided me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All the thoughts and opinions are my own. While it was slow for some reason, there are numerous gems scattered all throughout the book. Humour, wit, sarcasm, irony, you can find everything in this book. It made me cry, it made me happy, it made me think. The ending is not a fairy tale nothing bad happened type. Considering everything that happens in this book, it is close to a fairy tale ending as it can be. There were some twists I saw coming, others I didn't. The ones I did see didn't hinder my enjoyment at all. This book was a joy to read and I will say it again and again.

It is uncanny the amount of information one can gather from a simple toe. Said toe is of course, linked to other four toes which are in turn attached to a calf (slender) connected to a leg belonging to a woman called Polly (referred to as “Bold Receptionist” for far too long in the narrative after she is introduced) who has the dubious and eye-rolling ability to transform utterly innocent words like “sandwich” into erotic pronunciations (according to the hero’s point of view, of course). See, the first part of Angelmaker is enjoyable, but in a slow and very reflective way. We meet Joe, learn about his connections to the London underworld, hear a good yarn about what it’s like to be initiated as an undertaker, and then we meet Edie. As rumblings of a doomsday scenario gather on the horizon, Joe sort of stumbles from scene to scene without too much of a plan in mind. Aside from his unwitting involvement in activating the doomsday device, he is more of a spectator in the consequences than a participant—that is, until the government decides to turn him into a wanted man. I devoured the prequel trilogy in this series, loving how Morgan Greene presented his protagonist. Now, with a better understanding of Jamie Johansson, I am able to hash out the nuances of this more established cop in a series that is sure to offer some twists the foe dedicated reader. Greene continues to write effectively and has me begging for more at every turn. In the end, for all its old-new, serio-comic hyphenation, Angelmaker turns out to be a solid work of modern fantasy fiction, coupling credit-crunch anxiety with an understandable nostalgia for the mythical days of "good, wholesome, old-fashioned British crime".

Alex North is always going to be one of my immediate auto-read authors after stunning me with his debut, THE WHISPER MAN! Thank you Celadon Books for this gifted copy! ⁣ But an extremely bloated plot with obnoxiously verbose descriptions (of pretty much everything the main characters come across as they wander around) plus a recently discovered aversion for third person first tense narratives unfortunately kept me from finishing the book.

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It's probably because he is fixing her tyre, and in a position so absolutely compromised and vulnerable that it's clear he does not propose to do her harm. It might be because he's a bit like her older brother Peter, who died last year of cancer. Or it might be the feeling she has, that everyone has, that something is happening which is really important. One is Katie Shaw, presently cooking dinner for her family and worrying about her marriage and her daughter. Red car, Mommy! Red Car. Katie freezes. Thankfully, she is still married to the love of her life, Sam, and raising their lovely five-year-old daughter, Siena. But lately, she's been having communication problems with her husband. When her mother calls her to inform her that her brother is in trouble, she cannot let him go, and she gears up to compensate for the mistakes she's made in the past.

It was exactly at that point that I had to leave to attend a talk at Anglia Ruskin University by Philip Pullman on his new book Tales From the Brothers Grimm (the talk has been recapped brilliantly by The Other Ana over at Things Mean a Lot). After receiving a phone call from her mother informing her that her brother is missing, Kate who has a child of her own, tries to help. The story is definitely engaging. Katie is a good egg, and is easy to root for. North provides her with the handicap of an unsupportive, disbelieving husband, which was cause for a bit of eye-rolling. It is such a trope these days. Maybe always has been.

Customer reviews

When you buy an old house or a fixer-upper, one of its main selling points might be that it needs work, but it has "good bones." And when it comes to the Angel Maker, this is one book that, despite a need for some work, truly has those same sort of unique, sturdy, AND good bones. 🦴 🏠 There is one thing that I would have changed or shortened. It is more my personal preference than anything else. There is a part of the story (somewhere after two thirds of the book) when Joe finds himself alone. It was longer than I would have liked. Falk tells Jamie that someone accessed the records room and had taken Angelmaker material using the identity of her father's partner on the case Robert Nystrom but he was seen going through a tollbooth one hundred kilometres away at the time of the breach and now he's missing. Jamie guts it out...Learning much more than she thought she would...About the case, her Father, Herself...Did her Dad put an innocent man away?...Or is there something Else going on...

Bone cancer in children? What's that about?' How dare you? How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault? It's not right. It's utterly, utterly evil."Truly an enjoyable thriller. I was worried about who was going to survive the evil that was lurking and I was hoping for both Chris and Katie to survive.