In WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD, Thomas E. Sniegoski wants us to believe that his P.I. series protagonist, Remy Chandler, is actually the angel Remiel, who long ago renounced Heaven and is now serving time among us lowly mortals. Okay, no problem. He’s not the only author presenting us with a detective who is something other than human, as Mario Acevedo’s P.I. is a vampire.
But in stark contrast to Acevedo, Sniegoski can’t decide if Remy’s latest outing is a pulp-fiction adventure romp or a serious, urban-oriented story with religious philosophical overtones. It tries to be both, and ends up completely unconvincing.
A woman known to us only as Delilah can control the thoughts and actions of those around her, but she’s suffering from some kind of curse. There is a mysterious, religious object somewhere in the world that can remove it, so she spares no expense, nor cost of life, to pursue and obtain this object.
In the meantime, a desperate mother seeks out Boston-based Remy, because her 6-year-old daughter, Zoe, has been abducted, and she feels the local police are of no help. Remy would ordinarily refuse such a case, but one element pulls him in: Zoe left several drawings that foretold her future. In addition to her abduction, there are drawings of a man with wings who comes to her rescue.
Remy fears that the daughter might know his secret identity as Seraphim, a solder of God on Earth. Worse, we learn Delilah and her crew also know of Zoe’s preternatural powers, and that she has kidnapped the young girl to lead her to the object that will finally free her.
The novel’s alternating sections, tracing the actions of both Delilah and Remy, are so different in style and tone that you’d almost swear they were written by two different authors. The Delilah sections are swift and full of high adventure, including an prologue that plays like imitation Indiana Jones. But whenever Remy enters the picture, the style becomes much more serious and near ponderous as Remy stresses out over the fate of humanity under the threat of Satan, and then deals with the all-too-human realities of child abduction.
As if this contrast weren’t difficult enough to balance, Sniegoski makes things worse when he goes for cute with heavy-handed in-jokes about crime fiction. Not only does he insist on naming his main character Chandler, but he gives Chandler’s dog the name Marlowe.
Sniegoski is on to a cool idea with his angel-as-detective premise. If nothing else, the battle between Heaven and Hell is played out often enough on Earth to provide many fascinating cases for the likes of Remy. Unfortunately, this latest series entry ends up being a battle between pulp and reality-based fiction. And I fear neither side wins. —Alan Cranis
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• MEAN STREETS by Jim Butcher, Simon R. Green, Kat Richardson and Thomas E. Sniegoski
Related posts:
- Mean Streets
- A Madness of Angels: Or, the Resurrection of Matthew Swift
- Never Fear
- The Face of Fear
- Fear the Worst
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Read Sniegoski’s novella in “Mean Streets” and was very disappointed by it since I loved the angel-as-detective concept. He seems to be going for a hugely ponderous tone and there’s just no joy in the writing. I’m not saying it has to be a chucklefest, but Sniegoski’s just too heavy handed for me.