Book #66: The Black Angel by John Connolly
The Black Angel by John Connolly
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The fifth full-length Charlie Parker novel opens with the abduction of a young woman, also the cousin of Louis, one of Charlie's right-hand men. The plot includes the usual violent murders, and develops into a plot that could almost be from The Da Vinci Code, or Indiana Jones, inolving apocryphal stories about fallen angels, and a new group of religious fantatics.
The previous novel tied up a lot of loose ends, and I noticed that this book introduced a lot of new characters, although many of them were killed off very quickly. It did mean that at times large amounts of the narrative were for the purpose of giving comprehensive backstories to the new characters. The scariest new character is a man called Brightwell, who seems to be immortal, and seems to communicate with (or perhaps hallucinate) an angel. I am not at all familiar with the Biblical apocrypha, but I imagine the mythology behind the main plot was researched meticulously.
This was another story where it felt like there was an increase in the supernatural content, making it feel a bit like a horror or fantasy novel, but I found it enjoyable overall, and am assuming that many of the plot threads have probably been continued in the next book, including the secondary plot about Charlie's relationship with Rachel.
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