Angels of Destruction, a novel by Keith Donohue; published by Shaye Areheart Books; 368 pgs., ISBN: 078-0-307-45025-8.  $24 hardcover. Release date: March 3, 2009. (click thumbnail for larger image of cover)
  
        Angels of Destruction is the second novel by Keith Donohue.  His debut novel, The Stolen Child, received rave reviews and was a New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle best seller.
        Angels of Destruction is the story of lost souls, faith, fear, heartbreak and redemption.  It is an emotional, gripping mystery with overtones of magical realism, written with a literary flair reminiscent of T.C. Boyle.
        It is the story of an elderly widow, Margaret Quinn, who lives alone, and has never gotten over the loss of Erica, her only child, who ran off at the age of seventeen with her boyfriend, a 60’s style radical, to join a West Coast revolutionary group called the Angels of Destruction.  Now it is 1985, almost ten years later, and on a bitter cold night, a young child has materialized on her doorstep.  She says she is an orphan, nine years old. Her name is Norah, but her language implies that she is knowledgeable, far beyond her years.  Margaret, immediately drawn to the sagacious child, takes her in and together they fabricate a story so that Margaret can pass Norah off as her newly found granddaughter.
        Margaret’s sister, Diane, arrives to find Norah happily ensconced in the Quinn home.  Unknown to Margaret, Norah eventually hints where Erica might be. Without telling Margaret, Aunt Di follows the clues, which end in a small town in New Mexico.
        Meanwhile, someone is watching Norah from the sidelines, shadowing her every move and threatening to uncover her true identity.
        When Margaret sends Norah to school with a young neighbor boy, Norah begins to reveal her unusual gifts to her classmates; she stages a number of “miraculous” events that quickly arouse the suspicions of the children’s parents and their teacher.  She gets reprimanded but after a short reprieve, goes back to exposing the students to her mystical talents.  Her attempt to teach the kids to fly off a nearby bridge ends in disgrace, as she and the neighbor boy are brought home by the police.
        Who is she really? And what relationship does she bear to Margaret’s long-lost daughter, Erica, and another other-worldly child, Una, who befriends Erica and her boyfriend when their car breaks down in the Tennessee woods?
        The story is broken into parts (Book 1, 2, etc.), alternating between the present and past, generally told from Margaret’s and/or Erica’s point of view.  In the end, most but not all, is revealed, as Margaret and Erica are at last united.  And Norah?  Do angels fly?
        Highly recommended.
    
    
Lethal Legacy, a novel by Linda Fairstein; published by Doubleday. 372 pgs., ISBN: 978-0-385-52399-8.  $26 hardcover.  Release date: February 10, 2009.
     
        Linda Fairstein returns with Manhattan Assistant DA Alex Cooper caught up in a drama of greed, murder and old-money rivalry, in a tale that would delight most bibliophiles. The setting is the rarified world of book and map collecting, and the place is the New York Public Library’s rare book section, where conservators labor to maintain and/or restore priceless books and ancient maps.

        The story begins with an assault on a young woman, a conservator that worked for the library.  She has refused to cooperate with investigators about the circumstances of the crime and the police call in Asst. DA Alex Cooper, who is an expert in dealing with sexual assault victims.  But the victim, Tina Barr, still refuses to cooperate and then disappears.  A few days later, another woman turns up dead in the same apartment; at first the police believe she is Minerva Hunt, a wealthy heiress with connections to the Library.  The woman is dressed in Hunt’s clothing and carrying a monogrammed handbag with Hunt’s initials on it.  But Minerva is very much alive and identifies a jeweled book that was found on the body as a priceless family treasure now owned by her estranged brother Talbot.
        Alex and the investigators then turn to the Library for help and end up steeping themselves in the lore and arcane practices of the secretive world of collecting. When another body shows up in connection to the case, they realize that time is fleeting.  They must find the killer before he or she strikes again.  And indeed the killer does.
        And so, sealed within the library’s vast map rooms with experts and police all around, they try to uncover who would resort to murder to gain one of the world’s oldest maps within a copy of a priceless edition of Alice in Wonderland. 
        Although the novel reads like an encyclopedia at times—call it “New York Library information overload”—buried within those esoteric piles are moments of genuine suspense and a cast of eccentric characters worthy enough to keep one reading.  Alas, the ending is a bit too formulaic, its construct similar to Fairstein’s last Alex Cooper novel.
    
    
Woman With Birthmark, an Inspector Van Veeteren Mystery by Håkan Nesser, translated from the Swedish by Laurie Thompson; published by Pantheon Books.  336 pgs., $23.95 hardcover. ISBN: 978-0-375-42504-2. Release date: April 14, 2009.
     
        After hearing her mother’s deathbed confession, Maria Adler realizes she must do something to avenge her mother’s pain.  She changes her appearance and disappears, then re-emerges to complete her revenge.
        Inspector Van Veeteren and his associates are left bewildered by a series of murders in which several family-oriented, well-liked businessmen are shot at least twice in the heart and twice below the belt.  Always, before each murder, an old rock and roll song was played to the victim over the telephone, before they were lured by the killer to their eventual demise.  While the inspector pursues his leads in this ponderous police procedural, Maria Adler is always a step ahead of him.  She even leaves a letter for him after committing her last murder, explaining why she did it and telling him where she can be found. 
        The story is chilling in its intensity of the hatred that drives Maria Adler to seek revenge for the gang rape that resulted in her birth, but the ending is weak—a shrug with an “oh well” attitude.  Perhaps this is a cultural difference in what constitutes “justice”; nonetheless, it left this reader unsatisfied.
       
    
    
                                  Copyright © Sandy Raschke