Sunday, May 15, 2005

The Black Angel - John Connolly

The rebel angels fell, garlanded with fire.
And as they descended, tumbling through the void, they were cursed as the newly blind are cursed, for just as the darkness is more terrible for those who have known the light, so the absence of grace is felt more acutely by those who once dwelt in its warmth…
began the book we were handed three hours after the Cardinal Ratzinger was elected to the Throne of St Peter. Spooky.
The only clubber that enjoyed this book read it on a beach, where she soaked in every detail. The rest of us picked the plot and characters to pieces, while our beach reader calmly re-assembled the missing details leaving us unsure whether the weakness was the book, or our reading of it.
Either way, it is a cleverly written page turner, with a chopped-up narrative, different points of view and a bunch of other crafty devices to keep us guessing. The supernatural element is new to the Charlie Parker detective novels, but not out of place, given the strange and clever things that go on in John Connolly’s mind.

Who: John Connolly
What: The Black Angel
Who by: Hodder & Stoughton
When: May 2005
Where: London
Why: It's a good, spooky, triller
Why not: It's genre, so you'll either like it or not