Ian Tregillis’s Something More Than Night is a Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler inspired murder mystery set in Thomas Aquinas’s vision of Heaven. It’s a noir detective story starring fallen angels, the heavenly choir, nightclub stigmatics, a priest with a dirty secret, a femme fatale, and the Voice of God.Somebody has murdered the angel Gabriel. Worse, the Jericho Trumpet has gone missing, … Trumpet has gone missing, putting Heaven on the brink of a truly cosmic crisis. But the twisty plot that unfolds from the murder investigation leads to something much bigger: a con job one billion years in the making.
Because this is no mere murder. A small band of angels has decided to break out of heaven, but they need a human patsy to make their plan work.
Much of the story is told from the point of view of Bayliss, a cynical fallen angel who has modeled himself on Philip Marlowe. The yarn he spins follows the progression of a Marlowe novel the mysterious dame who needs his help, getting grilled by the bulls, finding a stiff, getting slipped a mickey.
Angels and gunsels, dames with eyes like fire, and a grand maguffin, Something More Than Night is a murder mystery for the cosmos.
A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of 2013
At the Publisher’s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
”more
I’ve heard good things about Tregillis’ works and their historical-fantasy settings and vibes, and given that this book is a standalone (often my preference) and a noir detective to boot I was drawn.
*** What to Expect
Read the blurb, and then notch it up several degrees… sideways. Tregillis goes for high-intensity literary devices, where the …
Trying to categorize SOMETHING MORE THAN NIGHT is a bit challenging. It’s part hardboiled detective fiction, part noir, part fantasy, part whodunit, part…well, some category of twisty-turny fiction I don’t have a name for but might be called Hitchcockian.
Fallen angel Bayliss, who enjoys playing a Philip Marlowe-style gumshoe, wants to know who …