A review by bookshopcat
Angel's Advocate by Mary Stanton

4.0

I still love the premise and the world Stanton creates. Bree as a character is easy to like, she is stubborn at doing the right thing, at doing her job even though she can definitely understand that her clients are not the best people. She can also be elitist, but her warm love for her family and willingness to acknowledge her privileges and temper her reactions to other people who might react to that helps mitigate those issues. Like the others the story also focuses on Bree trying to find out exactly what she needs to find out in order to help her clients, both on the temporal and celestial realms. It's clear Bree is not an investigator, but as far as I can tell, she is a pretty good lawyer in that she knows the procedures and the boundaries of what she can do as a lawyer. This early on in the series, it's also clear that she is trying to find her footing in juggling the two aspects of her practice, as well as trying to pry into the affairs of the deceased at their request with no one else aware that she had been asked in the first place. She is also much more uncertain compared to her later stories. As for the mystery aspect, again, it's clear she is not an investigator, as the mystery pretty much gets solved not because she figures out what actually happened but because she stumbles into one of the murderers. From there she is finally able to connect her collected facts and put in the last pieces of the puzzle.

As always I wished Stanton took more time in the narrative to talk about the Celestial courts and its interactions with the world. That was the part that drew me in but its presence is still smaller that I would like. The other parts of the story was good enough, but that other aspect would have been really cool.