Book Review: The Angel Maker

THE ANGEL MAKER | Alex North
2.28.2023 | Celadon Books
Rating: 3/5 stars

Growing up in a beautiful house in the English countryside, Katie Shaw lived a charmed life. At the cusp of graduation, she had big dreams, a devoted boyfriend, and a little brother she protected fiercely. Until the day a violent stranger changed the fate of her family forever.

Years later, still unable to live down the guilt surrounding what happened to her brother, Chris, and now with a child of her own to protect, Katie struggles to separate the real threats from the imagined. Then she gets the phone call: Chris has gone missing and needs his big sister once more.

Meanwhile, Detective Laurence Page is facing a particularly gruesome crime. A distinguished professor of fate and free will has been brutally murdered just hours after firing his staff. All the leads point back to two old cases: the gruesome attack on teenager Christopher Shaw, and the despicable crimes of a notorious serial killer who, legend had it, could see the future.

Alex North became an autobuy author for me after loving The Whisper Man. North’s writing has such a dark quality to it that I always know I’m in for something unexpected and twisty.

This is going to be a hard book to talk about without spoiling any of the details, so I’m going to keep things a bit vague and go with a pros and cons list review.

Pros:
📚 The setting! I loved that everything had a small town vibe where people and stories were interconnected. I thought this setting lends itself to making the characters’ interactions and location choices for different scenes seem authentic.
📚 Multiple POVs! I’m a sucker for multiple narrators because I love that it allows the reader to fully understand the author’s vision from all sides. I’m always eagerly waiting for how they’ll finally connect as well.
📚 The writing! I honestly didn’t fully understand what was happening in this book until around the midpoint, but North’s writing is so good that I knew I needed to keep going. I think this might be a case of me zoning out on the audio, so perhaps people who chose the physical copy didn’t have this issue. Despite that hiccup, when I hit my ah-ha moment, nothing could stop me from wanting to know how this book would end!

Cons:
📚 The multiple POVs not being labeled at the start of the chapters. I listened to this one on audio and with each chapter constantly switching narrators, I would have loved an addition of labeling who was going to narrate at the start of the chapter.
📚 The amount of characters. Whew! Ok, once I finally got where things were going, this was fine, but I was confused for probably the first half of the book trying to figure out who was who and what they had to do with the story.

A huge thank you to Celadon Books for my gifted copy!