Review: ANGEL CITY by Jon Steele

I had a crime fiction column published in the Irish Times at the weekend, which concluded with a short review of Jon Steele’s ANGEL CITY (Bantam Press). It ran a lot like this:

Jon Steele’s Angel City (Bantam Press, €20.50) is the sequel to The Watchers (2011), a novel that introduced us to Jay Harper, an English private eye living in Lausanne who belatedly realises that he is not a detective but an angel who is engaged in a timeless war against demonic forces of evil. Angel City opens with Harper foiling a terrorist attack on Paris, which leads to the discovery that a rogue priest is attempting to tap into a celestial power at the ancient Cathar fortress at Montségur in southern France with the intention of quite literally unleashing hell. It sounds fantastical, and it is, but American author Jon Steele, a former war reporter, is engaged in something rather more interesting than tales of the supernatural. The Watchers and now Angel City (the first two parts of ‘The Angelus Trilogy’) read like Paradise Lost redrafted by Raymond Chandler in a fevered dream, in which the demonic hordes are desperate to secure nuclear weaponry and the angels boast the kind of firepower Milton couldn’t have conjured up in his worst nightmares. It’s a compelling modern fable, the time-honoured tale of Good versus Evil rewritten according to a fatalistic theology at a time when technology has finally made possible the worst imaginings of ancient prophecy. – Declan Burke

  For the rest of the column, which includes reviews of the latest titles from Ruth Rendell, Charles McCarry and Tom Franklin and Beth Fennelly, clickety-click here …

Less Is Moore

With all the hoo-hah over the Irish Book Awards, it very nearly snuck under my radar that Bloomsbury is in the process of reissuing a series of Brian Moore’s novels, including NO OTHER LIFE, THE MAGICIAN’S WIFE and I AM MARY DUNNE. Of chief interest to crime fans will be THE STATEMENT, which was originally published in 1995, and about which the blurb elves have been wittering thusly:

Condemned to death in absentia for crimes against humanity, Pierre Brossard has lived in the shadows for more than forty years. Now, at last, his past is threatening to catch up with him. A new breed of government officials is determined to break decades of silence and expose the crimes of Vichy. Under the harsh glare of the Provencal sun, Brossard is forced to abandon the monastery where he has been hiding and turn to old friends for support - but can he really outrun his past?

  Brian Moore, who was born in Northern Ireland and emigrated to Canada in 1948, cut his teeth as an author writing crime novels, under the pseudonyms Bernard Mara and Michael Bryan. Frequently and favourably compared to Graham Greene, Moore was, like Greene, disposed towards writing both literary titles and more thriller-style tales. His best books, in my opinion, combined his gift for language and a serious moral investigation with a stripped-back, less-is-more narrative - the ideal crime thriller, in other words, as in the case of Moore’s political thrillers, LIES OF SILENCE and THE COLOUR OF BLOOD.
  I picked up a copy of THE STATEMENT in a second-hand bookshop in Dun Laoghaire yesterday, and I’m looking forward to getting stuck in, just as soon as I get all the work-related reading on the shelf out of the way. Which means, I suppose, that THE STATEMENT will be this Christmas’s reading treat, although I’d already lined up some Charles McCarry, Megan Abbott, Daniel Woodrell and James Sallis for that particular indulgence …