REDEMPTION POST MORTEM

In Buchman’s paranormal thriller, a nameless soul discovers that the afterlife is significantly different then he anticipated.

Instead of going straight to Oblivion, a soul finds himself shunted into the Pilot Program: The Heavenly Department of Health and Human Services puts him into a new body, and the overbearing Angel Azazel sends him on various missions. His first outing involves shutting down a gathering of Satanists and yields mixed results: He dispatches many of the Satanists and saves the woman they were about to sacrifice, but gets physically killed in the process. Rather than going to Heaven, as he’d hoped, he receives new orders, based on information in a folder that he brought back from the Satanists. The nameless soul must now locate and destroy the Book of Remedies—a lost volume of cures for all diseases in the world; to accomplish this task, he joins a living rogue named Juma and, eventually, Nora, the woman he recently rescued. He and Nora soon fall into a mutual attraction. After a series of missteps and misadventures, the trio finally locate the book, but a series of unexpected plot swerves leads the soul to use a time-trusted method to contact Azazel, who gives him one more fateful mission. Buchman’s version of the afterlife is a distinctive kind of hell in which bureaucracy and office politics reign. The Creator delegates tasks to Angels, who lord over Demons, who, in turn, rule over the “monkeys” (also known as humans). This scenario leaves the protagonist, who doesn’t even remember his mortal history, at the very bottom of this hierarchy; still, he manages to do the right thing, even though his missions have few positive outcomes. The hunt for the Book of Remedies forms the heart of the action-filled narrative, which shifts the narrative smoothly away from social commentary, although it does return on occasion. There’s adventure aplenty as the soul and his partners race across the Middle East and Asia hunting for dangerous treasure.

An inventive, twist-filled escapade with amusing supernatural trappings.