Read by Jeff Harding
Book 11 of Charlie Parker series
Genre: paranormal crime fiction
Format: hardback, unabridged audiobook
About The Wrath Of Angels:
In the depths of the Maine woods, the wreckage of an aeroplane is discovered. There are no bodies, and no such plane has ever been reported missing, but men both good and evil have been seeking it for a long, long time. What the wreckage conceals is more important than money: it is power. Hidden in the plane is a list of names, a record of those who have struck a deal with the Devil. Now a battle is about to commence between those who want the list to remain secret and those who believe that it represents a crucial weapon in the struggle against the forces of darkness.Source: Info in the About The Wrath Of Angels was taken from http://www.audible.co.uk/pd?asin=B008RMGRTG on 02/11/2012.
The race to secure the prize draws in private detective Charlie Parker, a man who knows more than most about the nature of the terrible evil that seeks to impose itself on the world, and who fears that his own name may be on the list. It lures others too: a beautiful, scarred woman with a taste for killing; a silent child who remembers his own death; and the serial killer known as the Collector, who sees in the list new lambs for his slaughter. But as the rival forces descend upon this northern state, the woods prepare to meet them, for the forest depths hide other secrets. Someone has survived the crash.
Something has survived the crash. And it is waiting.
©2012 John Connolly (P)2012 Hodder & Stoughton
My Thoughts:
After reading the book, I saw this image in the web (on one of my trawls) and I found it uncannily resembles Malphas, the crow lord, in the story. For those of you who have read the book, what do you think?... As a symbolic entity in this book, I think "he has yet a role to play, for good or for ill" as Gandalf would say...
So there's this two side characters introduced about several chapters into the book who are too stupid to live. They were shown that it would be stupid to do that, not once, but several times, so what do they do? They pick the stupid choice, every time, in their journey towards the torture chamber. Yeah, hold hands and smile and walk in... It's not that they were not shown that it was stupid. That it was dangerous. And what do they do? They rationalize it and go into denial... until they got sliced and diced...Sometimes I just want to throttle these stupid people for not seeing what is right before their eyes. And even think that they were asking for it. But in the end, I still felt for them. They did not deserve to be tortured and become sacrificial lambs just because they were stupid. Too steep a price for stupidity.
But I guess that is one of the tricks of writing, engage your readers' emotions. What I do appreciate with John Connolly is that he kills off non-consequential side characters whom the readers hasn't invested in a lot of emotion yet, though emotion is envolved. Unlike Joe Abercrombie who starts off with about 10 to 15 protagonists as a team or sets of teams of heros and kills them all off that at the end of the trilogy, the only one left standing is a side character and a minor one at that. Safe to say I won't be reading anymore Joe Abercrombies anytime soon. With that view, perhaps now you can understand my appreciation of John Connolly's killing off characters whom I haven't yet sunk two or three books' worth of emotional investment. Because somebody has to die, such is the nature of a murder mystery. At least don't kill the reader too! That reader tends not to buy or read that author ever again. At least I won't. Anyway, so I like that about John Connolly, but that is not the bestest best thing I like about this book, it's the plot! Threw me a few loops and surprises! I like it when a story is unpredictable. I also like the fact that this book threw in a few events which shed a light on the nature of our hero and more. I also really like the way some things turned out... Lots and lots of kudos to John Connolly for being a master story spinner!!
Empirical Evaluation:
Story telling quality = 5
Character development = 5
Story itself = 4.5
Ending = 4.5
World building = 4.5
Cover art = 4
Pace = (15 hrs and 17 mins listening time)
Plot = 5
Narrator = 5
Overall Rating: 4.5 out of 5 cherries
Connolly, well I did like the novellas I read
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