The divine retribution of Alex North's The Angel Maker

Alex North’s The Angel Maker

Reviewed by Michelle Souliere

 

I’ve been hearing about Alex North’s books from some of my customers over the last few years, so when it was announced he had a new title coming out, I asked the nice folks at Celadon Books for an advance reader of it, figuring it would be a good opportunity to jump in.  The Angel Maker is the third book North has written under his name (prior work was done under a pseudonym).  Its predecessors were The Whisper Man and The Shadows.  The hardcover releases Feb 28, 2023.

 

Alex North writes books that appeal to fans of horror, and fans of suspense thrillers.  I walked into The Angel Maker without knowing much more than that, although I must admit in retrospect that I am always hoping for that little extra frisson of supernatural mystery in the mix to really make it grab me.  And while it is not overt, there are certainly undertones of that feeling interlaced throughout this new story, to great and eerie effect.

 

Katie and Sam have been together since high school, when their bond was sealed by a terrible event that almost took her younger brother Chris from her.  Katie’s brother grew more and more troubled after his tragic near-miss, and is now estranged from her, to her everlasting guilt. 

 

Years after that life-altering day, she and Sam now have a young child of their own, and a seemingly average, normal life.  But a shadow begins to rear its ugly head, looking through the windows at her reasonably placid life, and cracks appear in the walls Katie has built over the decades.  Darkness appears ready to creep back in and tear everything down in final, blind vengeance for reasons she can’t even fathom.

 

Is it paranoia?  Her husband Sam thinks so.  Guilt?  Katie herself wonders about that.  Is it really something that ties back to the attack on Chris?  Or is it something even older…?

 

Chris goes missing from his newly-stable recovered life, as does his boyfriend.  An esteemed college professor dies a gruesome death.  A valuable notebook goes missing – one belonging to a historic serial killer who was legendarily able to see the future.  The skin-crawling minutiae of the past few weeks comes down on Katie like a tsunami as she tries desperately to find her brother, alone.  She can’t tell Sam because he thinks she’s imagining everything, and he insists that her brother is best kept cut off from their family.

 

Detective Laurence Page is trying to draw all these strings together meanwhile, and may be Katie and Chris’s only hope, as the tide of history reaches its bloody, burning hooks towards them and everything they hold dear – everything they have worked so hard to keep safe.

 

The culmination of this story-within-a-story reveals secrets kept generations deep in a forgotten corner of local history, and both the heights and depths of human nature -- compassion and depravity fighting to the death.

 

Closing Notes:

The Angel Maker is a stand-alone novel, as are North’s other two books.  If you are a John Connolly fan, as I am, you will definitely find something to latch onto in this book, and you will be well entertained.  Fans of Michael Connelly’s Jack MacEvoy books will also enjoy this title.

If you put your ear to her heart, you will hear the crashing surf - A Gothic Valentine for book lovers!

by Michelle Souliere

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Sharon has enjoyed gothic mysteries immensely since being introduced to them, but I rarely pick them up myself, probably because they tend to be heavy on the 💕romance💕 and helpless female protagonists. However, I recently found a 1987 US printing of The Castle of the Demon by Patrick Ruell (one of UK mystery author Reginald Hill’s pseudonyms), and couldn’t resist.  I hope someone brings it back into print soon.

I had fun with its mashup of tropes – a little bit of vintage gothic, a little bit of mystery, a generous dollop of local folklore, a dash of potential romances (plural!), all set against a seaside breeze, and by the end … well you might want to read it for yourself, so I don’t want to spoil anything.  Things get a little crazy towards the end!

What really grabbed me about the book initially besides its title (!!) and the diabolical cover (!!!!) was the writeup on the back:

“For Emily Follet, alone in the remote village of Skinburness, fear could take many forms.  It could be the college, formerly the castle of a renowned sorcerer, where no one seems to know what goes on.  It could be the mysterious black rider on his black horse.  Or the two recent unexplained drownings.  Or the green men.  Above all, the green men.”  And off I went to follow the train of green things, as I always do.

Please note that Skinburness is a real place, and its name is honest-to-gosh thought to mean "the headland of the Demon haunted castle."  I’m glad it inspired Hill to pen this tale!

Our narrator, Emily Follet, is a woman finding her own way for the first time perhaps ever.  She is determined to be independent.  She makes new friends during her vacation break, playing dominoes with the old village dudes at the local tavern, spending time alone with her lanky lolloping dog Cal on the beach, and at night she reads from a book on local folklore that she’s found on the bookshelves in her cottage.

But strange things start happening at an accelerating pace, and it becomes difficult to know who to trust and who to avoid, who to keep at arm’s length and who to have dinner with, if only for politeness’s sake.  New disappearances occur, the windswept dunes hide secret excavations… and maybe a corpse or two?  And in the depths of the night, alone in her cottage, she hears strange voices on the phone line, and sees something unbelievable peering through the window into her bedroom at 3:00 in the morning.

Of course, she can’t tell the polite Constable Parfrey the whole story about the face at the window.  He would think she was barmy.  “He seemed doubtful enough about its existence, as it was.  He probably suspected some kind of hysterical nightmare.  He would have hardly been reassured if she had told him the face was green.”

Events continue to ramp up, with mysterious nurses, midnight assaults, strange “archaeologists”, and then it goes completely off the rails in a fun little darkride.

So if you like a diversion on the spooky side, with a decently-written female narrator, a gothic seaside setting, just the barest dusting of romance, and a dog named Cal instead of Scooby-Doo, you’ve got yourself a book recommendation here!!!

 

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone!