Faith-based speculative fiction fans should enjoy this tale of an angel vigilante’s glorious journey.
This debut novel—and series opener—is a blend of Christian mythology, crime drama, and arcane thriller that follows two detectives as they attempt to track down a seemingly unstoppable killer.
Ian Jelani and his partner, Lane Madigan, are Miami police detectives tasked with finding a murderer who has been ritualistically butchering criminals—drug dealers, porn peddlers, terrorists. As the two investigate the elusive executioner, they discover similar homicides across the country. The “Holy Terror,” as the media have dubbed the killer, only targets hardcore criminals. Unbeknown to the two detectives, the entity behind the gruesome murders is an angel named Thumos, Yahweh’s right hand of justice whose flaming sword of vengeance has dispatched those who do evil against Yahweh’s children for millennia. But the recent killings have not been ordained by God—and Thumos is in danger of losing his soul to darkness. As Thumos struggles with his own spiritual demons, so do Jelani and Madigan, both dealing with their own issues with accepting God’s will. Fueled by Christian beliefs—relevant biblical verses and Christian doctrine abound—this tale about the spiritual awakenings of all three characters is powerfully moving. (Christian readers will also undoubtedly enjoy the pop-culture references, like the Christian metal band Stryper.) The pacing is brisk, and Dougherty’s narrative reads like a thriller, high intensity throughout with action-packed scenes from beginning to end. The big criticism here is the wild inconsistency in descriptions of both the setting and characters. Thumos, for example, is richly portrayed: He “shook his head, and his once long, flowing white hair floated away as multiple horns began to now appear out of his head. His once human-like ears stretched into elongated leathery appendages. His mouth expanded outward, creating almost a snout, with long, white fangs.” Satan, on the other hand, is barely described at all, with the devil wearing a black robe and having “grotesque fingers” and “grotesque appendages.”
Faith-based speculative fiction fans should enjoy this tale of an angel vigilante’s glorious journey.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2022
ISBN: 9781667861081
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Book Baby
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
As usual, Evanovich handles the funny stuff better (much better) than the mystery stuff.
Stephanie Plum’s 31st adventure shows that Trenton’s preeminent fugitive-apprehension agent still has plenty of tricks up her sleeve, and needs every one of them.
The current caseload for Stephanie and Lula—the ex-prostitute file clerk at her cousin Vincent Plum’s bail bonds company, who serves as her unflappable sidekick—begins with two “failures to appear.” Eugene Fleck is suspected of being Robin Hoodie, who robs from the rich and, yes, distributes the proceeds to the poor. Racketeer Bruno Jug, who’s missed his court date on charges of tax evasion, is also suspected of drugging and raping a 14-year-old. But neither of these fugitives can hold a candle to Zoran Djordjevic, aka Fang, a self-proclaimed vampire wanted in connection with the gruesome fate of his late wife and three other missing women. As usual, Stephanie’s personal life is just as helter-skelter as her professional life as a bounty hunter. She’s managed to get herself engaged both to Det. Joe Morelli, of the Trenton PD, and Ranger, a former Special Forces agent who runs a private security firm; she thinks she may be pregnant; and she’s willing to marry the father, whichever of her fiances that turns out to be. On top of it all, her nothingburger schoolmate Herbert Slovinski suddenly pops up at one of the funerals she ferries her Grandma Mazur to, hitting on her relentlessly and gilding his importunities by cleaning and painting her shabby apartment and laying new carpet. Luckily, Lula’s on hand to offer cupcakes that stave off the worst disasters, and whenever this hodgepodge threatens to slow down, another FTA appears, or fails to appear.
As usual, Evanovich handles the funny stuff better (much better) than the mystery stuff.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781668003138
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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