A review by mythaster
The Angel Maker by Alex North

4.0

This isn't really the kind of book I always enjoy reading, and the style is very of its genre - stark and blunt, a lot of telling and summary and not a lot of nuanced emotional exploration. A lot of clunky dialogue, too. But that's at least partly the genre for you. The story itself was very up my alley, though; I was worried that it would be a lot more gritty and hardboiled than it was, with some weak hand-wavey thing about the killer's ability to see the future, but there really IS a lot of clairvoyance going on, a lot of weird unexplained supernatural culty stuff going on. Accepting it for what it was, I really dug it and I even missed sleep a few nights to stay up reading.

The only things I have a problem with are

Spoiler

Michael Hyde's place in the story and why he attacked Chris, and the actual angel-making. It feels like those were parts of an earlier draft whose roles in the story were diminished later on, but North never actually took them out of the book. I don't know, when a book is called The Angel Maker, call me a ghoul but I kind of want to know what angel-making entails. And also why poor Chris almost got his face sliced off instead of just stabbed.