Something More Than Night

When the seraphim Gabriel dies, the lowly, noir-obsessed angel Bayliss must find a human soul to take his place immediately. That’s why ordinary human Molly Pruett dies in a convenient accident and wakes up with cosmic powers in the Pleroma, the dreamlike home of the angels. Tregillis (Necessary Evil) uses stranger aspects of heavenly lore to populate the Pleroma with fascinatingly inhuman angels who are wheels of snakes or have four faces and six wings. It’s nothing like Heaven as most humans imagine it: God is nowhere to be seen, and angelic politics are deadly. Bayliss sees himself as the clichéd noir hero of the story, regardless of what’s actually going on, but Tregillis wastes the comic and dramatic potential of this setup, and Bayliss’s thick gumshoe slang gets old very quickly. It’s far more interesting to watch Molly, caught between Heaven and Earth, as she solves the mystery of Gabriel’s death and decides her own place in the universe. Agent: Kay McCauley, Pimlico Agency. (Dec.)