The Way of Sorrows--The Angelus Trilogy, Part 3

June 29, 2015
Steele wraps up his apocalyptic Angelus trilogy with a bang. As readers know from 2012’s The Watchers and 2013’s Angel City, a war has been raging for the “soul of man” after supernatural beings betrayed their mission to guide humanity in its designated role of caretakers of Earth’s life forms. The beings’ lust for female humans led to breeding with them, which introduced evil into the world. Impressively, Steele balances the high eschatological stakes with humor. For example, Jay Harper, who’s actually a being hiding in the form of a dead man, wonders, “How the hell did we superior creatures of light survive two and a half million years in paradise while spending great swathes of time not knowing what to do next?” Such passages are a welcome respite from the grim narrative, which places the globe on the brink of nuclear Armageddon. Steele also deserves credit for making the complex backstory easy for first-timers to follow. Agent: Georgina Capel, Capel & Land Ltd.

August 1, 2015
Looping? A local? And what of us born of light and not of flesh? Steele (Angel City, 2013, etc.) wraps up his Swiss missive with a suitably apocalyptic bye-bye. Come the end of time, we'll all be speaking in Shatner-esque sentence fragments. Lots. Of 'em. And worse: "In a dark, silent room. Naked on a concrete floor. His wrists bound together in front of him; no idea where he was or how he got here." The reader will have an idea, of course: it's what happens when Satan's minions start messing about in the tidy confines of Lausanne. There, as patient readers of the Angelus Trilogy will recall, young Katherine Taylor once did a thriving trade as a, ahem, naughty person of the evening. Until, that is, she fell in with steely-jawed detective Jay Harper, whose brief includes fighting the forces of darkness, shadowy types that are now threatening Katherine and her young son, Max (and what kind of demigodly moniker is Max, anyway?). Katherine knows that, sins and all, she's "just an ordinary human being," but that doesn't keep her from taking odd trips along the space-time continuum. That's looping for you, which is just another way of rebooting reality, the better to keep track of what the bad guys are doing. Say what? Well, if you were an angel or a half-kind, you'd understand-and there's plenty of bad-guy activity to monitor as the story settles in on the beleaguered Middle East, where radical Zionists and black-hat Arabs are working hard to do each other in. Who's the bad guy? "Both," says a dishy Israeli intelligence agent. "That is the tragedy of it." Granted-but only one side has Zoroaster's sextant. And thus the plot thickens.... Never mind the logical improbabilities: it's a Dan Brown knockoff, to be sure, but Steele's story has its escapist virtues.

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July 1, 2015
Steele's third and final installment in his widely popular Angelus Trilogy picks up where the second novel, Angel City (2014), left off, with his lead characters fighting for survival against the forces of evil. Detective Jay Harper, an immortal angel occupying a human body that's subjected to frequent memory wipes, finds himself back at Switzerland's Lausanne Cathedral, where the trilogy began (The Watchers, 2012), with a new mission from heavenly command to rescue former escort Katherine Taylor and her son, Max, from the minions of the One True God, aka Lucifer. Taylor, in turn, is still recovering from her own forced amnesia amid the ruins of her Pacific Northwest home and Max's puzzling disappearance. In alternating narratives spanning the globe from Alaska to Russia, Steele slowly brings his two protagonists together again while hell's warriors build momentum toward waging a final earthly apocalypse in Jerusalem. Steele's dexterity in weaving sharply drawn, memorable characters into a multilayered story line is breathtaking, as is the pyrotechnic display of supernatural action that brings the series to a thrilling conclusion.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)