ENRAGE THE SKY

In Steele’s mystery novel, an English professor and a police officer struggle to solve a murder after the killer sends a cryptic letter.

Jeffrey Wilson, a literature professor at Seldon University, receives a verbose letter in which an anonymous man confesses to killing a girl. The man threatens to kill again unless the professor uses the included cypher to identify the letter writer. The killer uses a number of allusions and oblique language to give clues about his identity; the victim is a student at the college who was previously in Jeffrey’s class. The letter includes a jumble of literary references, and Jeffrey and his colleague Moss pick it apart to try to make sense of the cypher. Detective Sarah Kelley is also trying to solve the murder, and she believes Jeffrey is hiding something. (The killer writes rambling letters to Sarah, too.) Meanwhile, Jeffrey’s demanding father thinks his son should retain a lawyer in case the letter implicates him in the crime. Readers get a few scenes from the killer’s point of view, filling in the backstory of his childhood and the trauma he’s experienced (“He peered up frantically, searching the heavens for a great change, for an escape, for an absent God, and for a different answer to his prayer”); it emerges that the murderer may be killing because of something that happened to his sister, and something about the case triggers Sarah’s memory of a previous crime. The narrative is weighed down by a lot of wordy, purple prose; the text is dense and at times impenetrable. Much of the novel is spent on the contemplative explication of various texts and literary allusion—there are several scenes that are just Jeffrey and Moss trading quips about the references in the original letter. There is some sense of urgency in the fact that Jeffrey must solve the cypher in order to prevent another murder, but the pacing of the novel doesn’t support this; too often, the narrative stops to describe and explain rather than move the story forward. Even so, Steele delivers a brutal twist of an ending.

A meandering mystery.