A high-fantasy account of reality as seen by one of Satan’s brothers, sure to appeal to lovers of both fantasy and Christian...
Bishop’s debut novel offers the bitingly ironic confessions of a fallen angel.
This is a sprawling, alternate account of key theological points of Judeo-Christian mythology, including God’s Creation of the universe, the ordering of the heavenly host, the births of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and the toiling of mankind under the whips and temptations of the forces of darkness. It’s all dictated to a hapless mortal man named Paul by a fallen angel who calls himself Jetebais, who’s the same age as other famous fallen angels, such as Lucifer, as well as the sea monster Leviathan. From him, readers learn details of different kinds of heavenly beings and of the mission that he’s set for himself in the human world: to expose the deeds and designs of Satan and thwart his manipulations of humankind. Jetebais knows Satan’s thoughts and has a carefully high estimation of his adversary’s abilities: “He is visible and invisible,” he tells Paul, “he is colossal and microscopic.” Jetebais himself is far from innocent, though; as he confesses, he’s caused great pain in the name of charity and fairness, but he’s determined to counterbalance Satan’s influence in the world. Bishop spends a good deal of time presenting seminal events from Old Testament literature from Jetebais’ new viewpoint, and he portrays Jetebais as a proud, defiant character who protests his innocence of Lucifer’s original offenses (“I did not follow Satan; I simply left at the same time!”). But as the action moves forward to the present day (including, inevitably, to papal politics), the author fills it with human characters. Readers will also find that the narrative takes on more sharply theological tones; at one point, it even provides the fallen-angel perspective on other religions throughout the world. The rest of the story, though often patchy with expository dialogue, is richly atmospheric, as when Jetebais warns humans about Satan, “Remember, you are nothing but livestock to him, to be teased and tortured for the sheer fun of it.”
A high-fantasy account of reality as seen by one of Satan’s brothers, sure to appeal to lovers of both fantasy and Christian literature.Pub Date: March 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5049-8573-4
Page Count: 302
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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