10 September 2021

A Terrible Fall of Angels by Laurell K. Hamilton

 

A man walking with a gun in his hand. His shadow has angel wings.

ANGELS WALK AMONG US, BUT SO DO OTHER UNEARTHLY BEINGS IN THIS BRAND-NEW SERIES BY #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR LAURELL K. HAMILTON

Meet Detective Havelock, a man with the special ability to communicate directly with angels. A former trained Angel Speaker, he devoted his life to serving both the Celestial beings and his fellow humans with his gift, but a terrible betrayal compelled him to leave that life behind. Now he’s a cop who is still working on the side of the angels. But where there are angels, there are also demons. There’s no question that there’s evil at work when he’s called in to examine the murder scene of a college student—but is it just the evil that one human being can do to another, or is it something more? When demonic possession is a possibility, even angelic protection can only go so far. The race is on to stop a killer before he finds his next victim, as Zaniel is forced to confront his own very personal demons, and the past he never truly left behind.

 

A Terrible Fall of Angels (Zaniel Havelock, book one) by Laurell K. Hamilton

Start date: September 6, 2021

End date: September 7, 2021

Rating: 3 ½ out of 5 stars

There was so much, for lack of a better term, stuff packed into this novel. It’s an ambitious first novel of a series. I feel like Hamilton had a lot of ground she wanted to cover to establish this story and subsequent novels, and she packed it all into one nearly 400-page book. It’s not necessarily a bad thing but it’s not a great thing either.

Detective Zaniel Havelock works for the Metaphysical Coordination Unit (colloquially known as the Heaven and Hell unit), which is a part of the police department that deals with crimes with a supernatural bent. Zaniel is called to the scene of a murder, and what bumps the crime to Zaniel’s division are the angel wings found scattered across the crime scene. It becomes clear to Zaniel that the murderer was no angel when a live angel appears and tells him that the victim was killed by something unknown, something not demonic “but it should be” (Hamilton 18).


Old-fashioned policework sets the officers on the trail of a college student named Mark Cookson who coincidentally ends up being on the same hospital floor as Zaniel’s coworker who had an episode after seeing the angel who appeared to Zaniel at the crime scene. Zaniel realizes quickly that the college student is being ridden by a demon but when the young man dies in the subsequent police shootout, not everything is as it seems.

This is one of the nagging questions I had when I finished the book. What was Mark? The angel in the beginning implies that he’s not a demon but he should be. His body dies repeatedly, and he comes back again and again, which everyone says shouldn’t be happening. The demon and Mark seem to both be inhabiting Mark’s body since they take turns speaking, like a regular demonic possession. His body can change in physicality, which theoretically only demons should be able to do because they’re like angels in that their appearance is persuaded by the thoughts of humans around them. Inside Mark’s bedroom, the officers find a somewhat sentient bottle of demon blood as a clue, and both Detective Athena Ravensong (a Wiccan priestess) and Zaniel are injured attempting to fight back against it. The bottle mysteriously disappeared at the end of the story. I’m frustrated and unsatisfied that I don’t know what Mark was even after he is successfully (?) slayed at the end of the novel.

What makes Zaniel a unique asset to his team is that he was trained as an Angel Speaker, which at its core means a person who can communicate with angels without going insane. The College of Angels is where people learn this ability, but it’s slowly revealed that the school is really a cult that kidnaps children who have displayed this talent. The children are stripped of their birth names and given new “angelic” names upon entrance—Zaniel’s birth name was Corey. The school teaches the children how to hone their skills, and it also does some awful stuff like strip the children of all their spiritual beings except for their guardian angel to push an Abrahamic religious agenda. People never leave the school premises of their own volition, which makes Zaniel distinctive.

It’s hinted at that Zaniel did something in a holy gray area, which prompted him to voluntarily leave the school to prevent further corruption. Piecing together what we learn through Zaniel’s thoughts and dialogue, it seems like he started talking to an angel and influenced her appearance. Angels have neither a shape nor a gender unless influenced by a human’s thoughts. At some point, their relationship turned romantic in nature and before anything more could happen, Zaniel left the school and all contact with celestial beings behind. That is, until the events of this novel. I look forward to learning more about this unnamed angel whose punishment was seclusion to meditate on whether to fall or perform penitence.

One of Zaniel’s classmates is a man whose angelic name was Levanael. He had what the teachers thought was a mental breakdown after speaking with a cherub, and because of his assumed weakness, the school stripped him of his angelic name and kicked him out. He became homeless as a result. Zaniel has been in contact with the man now named Jamie throughout the years, believing him to be insane, until he shows up at Zaniel’s house looking (and acting) like his normal self. It’s revealed that Jamie, currently wanting to be called Levi, hadn’t had a mental breakdown. His psychic shields weren’t strong enough to hold back all the celestial knowledge he was receiving:

“I heard voices, millions and millions of thoughts, prayers, screams of pain, people screaming in agony and begging God to help them.” (Hamilton 279)

With the help of a woman named Emma, he was able to shield himself from the psychic bombardment. This interaction between Zaniel and Levi acts as a strange way to move the plot along because if Zaniel hadn’t talked to Levi, the series of events that leads to Mark’s death wouldn’t have conveniently happened. Anyway, a long time is devoted to Zaniel and Levi talking in Zaniel’s apartment about his transformation in an annoying, roundabout way.

In fact, there are many long-winded sections where the story basically jogs in place throughout the novel. Most involve Zaniel thinking for a paragraph that takes up the entire page. It’s possible this was a stylistic choice from Hamilton to represent Zaniel’s thought process since he’s presented as a deep thinker, or it’s a case of an editor being too lazy to cut down on the run-on paragraphs. Coupled with the ginormous paragraphs are lots of tiny chapters, sometimes only a page and a half long. It made reading jarring, going back and forth from long paragraphs to short chapters.

While in the hospital, Mark takes a patient named Kate hostage. Zaniel eventually rescues her but feels guilt that she was possibly sexually assaulted by Mark during the altercation. There’s a scene where Zaniel and Kate talk in the aftermath, and Kate reveals that she’s Baba Yaga’s great-great-great-granddaughter. She accidentally scratches him, which causes her to reveal this to him, because her scratches hurt more than they should. This storyline goes unresolved. Zaniel’s scratches get a few mentions after this point like they should mean something, but what they should mean isn’t explained. It’s simply left like breadcrumbs leading to nowhere.

I loved the equal representation of LGBTQA+ characters. Detective Athena Ravensong is a lesbian and Detective Lila Bridges is bisexual. Neither of their sexualities were shown as anything more than descriptors of their characters. Lila sympathizes with Zaniel when he mentions he has couples counseling with his wife by saying she wished her ex-wife would have gone with her to counseling when she asked her to. Athena’s wife is mentioned a handful of times as a supporting character, such as when Athena is hospitalized after fighting the bottle of demon blood. I recognize that we’ve only seen two female characters of the LGBTQA+ community but it gives me optimism for future installments. I hope this is a trend we start to see in new novels where members of the LGBTQA+ community can be characters without their sexuality being their entire purpose in the story.

I found the way religion was handled in the story to be well done. Zaniel describes himself as Christian. His boss, Lieutenant Adinka Charleston, is a Voodoo practitioner. Detective Athena Ravensong is Wiccan. Not only is there a variety of religions represented, but it appears that the police force must use politically correct terms when speaking about religions, which gave me a chuckle.

“Me talking about my personal belief in God isn’t going to help Detective Gimble.”

“Don’t you mean personal belief in Deity, Detective Havelock?” said a deep voice from outside the curtain.

I smiled and said, “Sorry, Lieutenant Charleston, I forgot my political correctness for a second.” (Hamilton 17)

            Zaniel doesn’t use terms like good and evil to describe parts of religions and their ceremonies. Demons and angels are presented as existing outside of specific religions. The various ceremonies performed by the characters are shown as equally powerful. But not every character is represented as religiously tolerant, which raises the power of the other characters’ tolerance.

“The witch says you gave her your power to tap into for her spell.”

I didn’t like the inflection on the word witch when she said it, but it was Lila who said it out loud. “You say witch like it’s a bad thing.”

“I was taught that all ways of power are lesser than the way I was taught. I mean no offense, but it is what I believe.”

“Do you think that witches are all evil?” Lila asked.

“Don’t ask her that, Lila, you won’t like the answer,” I said. (Hamilton 189)

What knocked this story down a few stars for me was all the unanswered questions I was left with when I finished reading. Some questions are good because it’s implied they’ll be answered in the next book like what exactly did Zaniel do that made him leave the school, are Zaniel and Reggie going to get back together or divorce, and what did Suriel (one of Zaniel’s former classmates who works for the school) mean when she said she was afraid of the College of Angels. Other questions disappointed me because I don’t necessarily feel like they’ll be answered such as was Mark a human inhabiting a demon’s body, why did Suriel attempt to sever Athena’s connection to her spirit guides, and why do the angels want to “fix” Zaniel (and why did Harshiel stop Turmiel from healing Zaniel). I’ll be impressed if those are answered in subsequent books.

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