This book packs a punch. Sam Young is a criminal defense attorney and boy, is he busy. We have the big case of the book: the serial killer known as the Rosslyn Ripper. We have half a dozen smaller criminal cases going on in orbit around that one. And we have a mysterious nun and a secretive priest in possession of a dark and disturbing journal that may belong to the Rosslyn Ripper or may belong to someone else entirely.
Juggling all these cases in your mind makes the reader’s head spin a bit, and I think that’s intentional. Sam Young is running from one crisis to another and we’re running right along with him.
This book is mainly what it claims to be on the front cover: a legal thriller. Think police procedural only it’s a lawyer instead of a cop and his ways aren’t exactly always legal. Young has a whole mess of helpers; more than a few who are living on the shady side.
But what interested me in this book in the first place was its promise of something a little supernatural amidst all the crime and DNA. And there is a little bit. Not a lot – not yet. Young has the ability to nudge his way into people’s minds a bit, get an honest read on them, sometimes push them in the direction of the decisions he wants them to make. Most of the strange stuff, however, happens in a crazy fast half-reveal in the last fifteen or so pages of the book. I had to stop and go back over everything in my mind to get it all (I think) straight. And what it leads up to is the promise of a great series featuring Sam Young and a few others. Others who might be descended from fallen angels. Or might…be fallen angels? Anyway they don’t seem to be able to die and they have some freaky powers similar to Sam’s, so…we shall see. I’m looking forward to the second book and crossing my fingers that there might be a whole series in the works.
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