Death Rides Again by Janice Hamrick

Janice Hamrick’s understanding of human behavior and emotion brings a depth and weight to a subgenre of mystery often referred to as “light.” Her Austin high school teacher protagonist Jocelyn Shore, a realist who would like to be a romantic with a sense of justice and protective love of her own, is willing to get her hands dirty to find the killer. In her latest, Death Rides Again, Hamrick makes murder a family affair. A great opening sentence that sets up plot, tone, and her heroine’s voice:

“The day Eddy Cranny got himself murdered started out bad and went downhill from there…especially for Eddy.”

We first meet Eddy when he’s being threatened with a shotgun by Jocelyn’s uncle Kel. Jocelyn and her cousin Kyla, who often serves as her Watson, have traveled to their hometown of Sandcreek, Texas for a Thanksgiving family reunion. Needless to say, we soon find out they aren’t the Brady Bunch as Jocelyn intercedes the shotgun incident after Kel discovers Eddy has been beating on his girlfriend Ruby June; Jocelyn’s cousin and Kel’s daughter. After the situation is diffused, they discover that Ruby June is gone.

Jocelyn and Kyla’s search for for their cousin takes them around Sand Creek, skillfully rendered by Hamrick in its decorative limbo between Thanksgiving and Christmas, introducing us to its citizens and suspects outside the family. After the search proves fruitless, they return to the ranch where Collin, Jocelyn’s cop boyfriend (or possible boyfriend, which is dealt with in a subplot) is waiting. Later that night, they discover Eddie’s body in his pickup.

The mystery involves corruption, horse racing, drug cartels, and even lions, tigers, and bears. Most of all, it explores family dynamics. As an author introducing so many characters, Hamrick understands the use of stereotypes, as well as how we do this to our own family members, then quickly begins to shade them with dimension. Much of the humor involves how little doubt Jocelyn has in her family being involved with blackmail and murder. Hamrick also looks at the tribalism of family. Jocelyn may refer to half her clan as “rabid hillbillies hopped up on Judge Judy and reruns of CSI”, but nobody else better insult or mess with them.

Death Rides Again shows Janice Hamrick’s skill as an author. Her style serves her characters and story without heavy author flourishes. Being naturally unique, hers is an effortless voice (the kind that much effort and talent are poured into) that easily moves from humorous, romantic, suspenseful, and poignant, because it is so human. It’s a voice I look forward to hearing again.

Janice Hamrick’s series featuring Jocelyn Shore (or her “Death” series, as you might call it), is a breath of fresh air. It borrows elements from several subgenres and plants them in the traditional mystery form. In her latest, Death Rides Again, the Austin high school teacher is back in her small Texas hometown, dealing with her family and their relationships as much as she does with murder. If that sounds too “cozy” or soft, there’s gun play, drug cartels, and a great action climax with a lion (trust me, it works). Janice was kind enough to answer a few questions about the book, Texas, and family. For the record, she is the only only author I know who redacts her own swear words.

MYSTERYPEOPLE: Death Rides Again is your most Texas book. As a transplant, what makes living in the Lone Star state a unique experience?

JANICE HAMRICK: I LOVE Texas. Living here is a constant reminder of the American experience and the character and strength of the people that settled the West. I can’t drive five minutes outside the city without wondering how the heck people traveled even half an hour through such harsh country, let alone for weeks on end. The land itself is completely unforgiving. The creeks are dry ninety-five percent of the time; the other five percent they’re flash flooding. The plants are designed to kill you – if they aren’t poisonous, they’re covered in thorns. The animals are worse. Fire ants, snakes, coyotes, hawks – we’ve got ‘em all. We’re actually warned not to leave small dogs outside because they can be scooped up by birds of prey. (I have a little dog, but she’s chunky enough that it would take a pterodactyl to lift her, and the last time I checked even Texas doesn’t have those.) The best thing is that Texans seem to take it all in stride.

MP: What makes it a great state to write about?

JH: Everything’s bigger (and better) in Texas! For one thing, Texans have a real sense of state pride and identity. I travel a great deal, and no matter where I go, everyone “knows” Texas. I think a lot of Europeans secretly believe that we still ride horses and carry guns – an impression I would never try to correct, because on a certain level it just seems right. For writers, Texas is less a setting and more of a character in its own right. Who wouldn’t love writing about it?

MP: One thing I loved about the book is while Jocelyn’s love for her family is evident, she can believe many of them are capable of blackmail and murder. What did you want to explore with family dynamics in this book?

JH: Family dynamics are always rich fodder for a writer. I think most of us deeply believe that we ourselves are completely normal, while other people (especially family members) are bat-sh** crazy. Family members are simply the crazies we can’t avoid, especially around the holidays. Jocelyn is a lot of fun because she has a pretty realistic opinion of people in general and of her relatives in particular. The fact that she believes some family members are capable of blackmail and murder doesn’t in any way lessen her love and probably actually increases her respect for them.

MP: Every time I start to give Jocelyn’s cousin, Kyla, the benefit of the doubt, she does something extremely self centered or puts Jocelyn in an uncomfortable situation. What does the relationship between the two of them provide for you?

JH: Although they’re cousins, Kyla and Jocelyn are closer than most sisters, and they have a certain amount of sibling rivalry going on most of the time. You’ve heard the old joke about an older brother protecting the younger one from a bully and saying “No one beats up my brother…except me.” Kyla is a lot like that.  She loves Jocelyn, but she’s not above poking the bear, whether for her own amusement or because she thinks Jocelyn needs a sharp nudge. For Jocelyn, Kyla is the fun, adventurous, flamboyant soul that she’d like to be, if she had the nerve and the complete lack of social filters. For a writer, that kind of complex relationship provides infinite possibilities.

MP: While you get categorized as a  “cozy” or “light” mystery author, your books have enough gunfire, beatings, corruption, and drug cartels to keep a hard boiled fan like myself engaged. How would you describe the series?

JH: I think of the books as traditional mysteries with a dash of humor and romance, and I think they are a little edgier than the typical “cozy” mystery. I’m actually happy they don’t easily fit into a category, because I’d like readers to consider the stories and characters individually and not start with a lot of preconceived ideas. Of course, it bites me in the…well, you know what…when a reader gets upset by something they weren’t expecting.

MP: What makeS Jocelyn a character worth returning to for you?

JH: I love Jocelyn’s blend of optimism and realism. She has a lot of insight into the people around her, and she is perfectly able to see the darker side of their characters and motivations, but at the same time she honestly likes most of them. Even for people she actually does distrust or dislike, she is still able to feel some empathy or understanding. Her ability to take the good with the bad is the key to all her relationships as well as to much of the humor in the book.  I also really like the way in which she was feeling pretty fragile and damaged after her divorce (in Death on Tour), but has slowly started regaining her sense of confidence and strength without ever turning bitter.

If you have your own questions for Janice, she’ll be here at BookPeople, this Wednesday, June 19th at 7pm signing and discussing Death Rides Again. Join us! 

Jed Ayres blowing minds with the hilarious crime fiction in his collection, F*ckload of Shorts.

THE Scott Phillips reading from his new novel, Rake.

Jesse Sublett singin’ them sad, sad murder ballads. He also read from his latest, Grave Digger Blues.

Scott M. got in on the action, too.

The next Noir at the Bar is on the books for Saturday, July 20 and will feature Marcia Clark, Josh Stallings and Tim Hallinan. Stay tuned for details.

Tom Pitts is another one of the authors from Snubnose Press, a publisher MysteryPeople is exclusively selling, who we’ve taken a liking to. If you like great noir banter, Tom’s your man. His novella Piggyback is a fun, dark novel with two drug runners on a road trip to Hell. Cars also play a part in his short story City Tow, published by the gang at Beat To A Pulp.

http://www.beattoapulp.com/stor/2013/0317_tp_CityTow.shtm

First, Scott-

MysteryPeople: I believe this is your first time to get out of the Midwest for a novel. I know you spent time in Paris, but other than experience what drew you to use it?

Scott Phillips: It was originally written for a collection of novels from a French publisher, La Branche, all of which were intended to be made as TV movies. That plan never went anywhere, but the idea was that it had to be a thriller, it had to be filmable in Paris, and it had to have Friday the 13th in it somewhere.

MP: I didn’t realize until after the book that your protagonist has no given name just the one of the doctor he plays on TV. Was there a specific intention of that?

SP: Not really, but at a certain point I realized I hadn’t given the actor his own name and I left it at that. The friend I based the character on was really a soap opera actor, the star of a show called Santa Barbara, which was enormously popular in prime time in France, and it occurred to me that almost no one in France knew his name, the fans always referred to him by his character’s name. We really did try and make a movie about the arms of the Venus de Milo; in retrospect we’re probably lucky we failed. A lot of the events in the book are exaggerated versions of things that really happened back then.

MP: As a writer, what makes him a fun character?

SP: He’s a self-deluded narcissist, always trying to convince the reader (and himself) that he’s a swell guy, always looking out for other people. And that sort of supreme self-confidence of his is amusing to write. Not dissimilar to Bill Ogden, from The Walkaway and The Adjustment.

MP: While you show the film business, warts and all, isn’t the normal skewering of it that you get with many authors that use it as a backdrop. As somebody who is involved with the industry, how do you view it?

SP: As I say above, many of the events described in the book really happened in the course of trying to get that movie made. People are always trying to get people to work for free, always trying to scam money out of backers, always trying to screw their way into the movie business.

MP: Sex plays a large part in Rake as well as your other work. What’s the best way for an author to approach it without coming off as porn?

SP: I have no idea. I love to write about sex, but it never occurs to me that anyone might find it arousing. I suppose I try and depict it in a matter-of-fact way, awkward and sometimes embarrassing and often thrilling. The worst kind of sex writing, I think, is when the writer tries to idealize it, all arching backs and glistening torsos and simultaneous orgasm. Also terrible is the sort of thing where the author gets overly hyperbolic and starts comparing genitalia to foodstuffs and planetary bodies and automotive parts.

MP: You’re doing our Austin Noir At The Bar with your friend and cohort, Jedidiah Ayres. What do you like about his writing?

SP: He has a willingness, or maybe it’s a compulsion, to go too far. Where a more psychiatrically stable writer might pull back, Jed plunges ahead, damn the torpedoes. The one about the groupie, the dead rock-star and the groupie’s boyfriend is one of the funniest and most disturbing stories ever written, and yet he manages to bring a kind of sweetness to it.

As Jed proves here, he even goes too far in Q&As. To fit the standards of BookPeople (Not necessarily MysteryPeople) some redaction was necessary.

MysteryPeople: Your short story collection is titled A F*ckload Of Shorts and you have a novella titled Fierce Bitches. Do you plan to use swear words in your titles like John D MacDonald used color?

Jed Ayres: I really don’t want to lock myself into a pattern like that. I wonder sometimes, what color Sue Grafton’s face drained to when her publisher said, “Fantastic, I guess we know what the next one will be called.” Dude, she must’ve looked awful. “How many of these f–kers do I have to write?”

I will say this, though, I had a ‘dicussion’ with someone over the title of my novel Peckerwoood. They told me that it would have to go – you just couldn’t name a book that – and I said “That’s okay, it can go back to the original title, ‘Shitbird.’”

We’ve not resumed that conversation.

Lucky for me, I guess, the publishers I’ve had had the sack to keep the titles. In fact, both Brian Lindenmuth at Snubnose and Cameron Ashley at Crime Factory are the ones who officially titled those books. I’d titled a query letter to Brian A F–kload of Shorts and he thought it was the name of my book and really argued for it when it came time to call it something (the asterisk was added to match the title of the film adaptation of one of my stories – A F*ckload of Scotch Tape), and Cameron seized on a joke I’d made that the book should be called Fierce Bitches after a line of interior monologue one of the characters has at the end (and in the context of the line, I think it’s actually a very sweet title – and why I consider it a love story), and wouldn’t let it go. I didn’t argue with him, though. That title has balls. Or, uh, ovaries.

MP: In F*ckload Shorts, what story do you consider the epitome of your brand of storytelling?

JA: The good one. Don’t bother with the others.

MP: Most of the stories deal with people on the lower rungs of the ladder. Why do losers make good protagonists for you?

JA: I’ve never been able to identify with the characters that I encounter in fiction who are cool, accomplished, scary-smart or generally good at stuff, so when I write it’s gotta be about folks I can identify with. Weakness, brokenness, pettiness, unedumacatedness – these are things I believe and understand – and I’ll follow a character displaying those like I’m reading my own diary. I’m much more easily invested in their fates.

MP: St. Louis Noir At The Bar has shined the light on some great local talent. What makes the city conductive for good crime fiction?

JA: Same as anyplace – it’s got people. People equal crime. Still, you’re right, we’ve found a lot of awfully good stuff around here (or good, awful stuff if you prefer) – maybe it’s the climate. There’s also a rich and terrible history of outlaws and crime that has passed into folklore in these parts – from The James/Younger Gang to Stagger Lee and Egan’s Rats. That’s bound to spark the dark imaginations of a few talented folk.

MP: You are not only a writer of crime fiction, but also a reviewer of it on your website Hardboiled Wonderland. Who are some talents more people should know about?

JA: I think Clayton Lindemuth, J. David Osborne and David James Keaton all have new books that are putting a foot up the ass of American words and everybody ought to take note. Same with Jane Bradley, Benjamin Whitmer, Jordan Harper, Jake Hinkson, Greg Bardsley, Johnny Shaw, Todd Robinson, Matthew McBride, J.I. Baker, Peter Farris… Some of them are pretty well known in this very small corner of the crime fiction world, but if I take a step back, I realize it’s a far smaller notoriety than they deserve. And, y’know for the life of me, I can’t understand why people like Dennis Tafoya, Roger Smith, Christa Faust and Sean Doolittle aren’t housef–kinghold names by now. Oh, and just you, the hell, wait and see who’s talking about Kieran Shea after Koko Takes a Holiday drops – that ought to be huge.

MP: Why should people take time out on Father’s Day and come out to our Noir At The Bar at Opal Devine’s on South Congress?

JA: Man, talk about a self-answering question. It’s all right there. It’s Father’s Day – skip the family dinner at Chili’s and bring the old man out for something he’ll actually enjoy. Or how about, you just spent an afternoon with your family, come chill the hell out with some nasty ass fiction and tasty tunes and we’ll raise a glass.

Or, every time you don’t support independent bookstores and authors, the terrorists, the Taliban and the NSA win. I really do hope you turn up.

To experience Scott Phillips, Jedidiah Ayres, and Jesse Sublette without a filter come out to Opal Divine’s at 7PM on June 16th.

All the Noir At The Bars sprouting up around the country are mainly due to the one in St. Louis. Scott Phillips told his friend Jedidiah Ayres about attending Peter Rozosky’s unique event in Philadelphia where authors read at a local tavern and they decided to do their own. Since they started, they’ve introduced the likes of Jonathan Woods, Frank Bill, and Matthew McBride. My Austin Noir At The Bar accomplice, Jesse Sublett, and I are happy to welcome our hard boiled brothers this Father’s Day to our own Noir At The Bar at a new location.

Of all the the authors I’ve come to know, Scott Phillips has been my friend the longest. He was the one who introduced me to Jesse. Not only is he a great guy who put many a good book on my radar, he’s one of the most talented writers out there. If you’re not familiar with his work, you need to be. He has a great ability to make you laugh and cringe at the same time. He proves it again in his latest, Rake.

Jedidiah Ayres has been making a name for himself with his short fiction. Most have been collected in A F*ckload Of Shorts, a collection of twisted, violent tales with a a special brand of humor. Many times he uses the decaying St. Louis cityscape as the backdrop for his losers who struggle to hold on to the bottom rungs of the ladder.

Jesse and I will be joining Scott and Jed at Sunday’s Noir at the Bar here in Austin. As usual, Jesse will provide music as well as a reading. His new book, Grave Digger Blues, is a fun novel where hard boiled meets beat writing. I’ll also be doing a reading (feel free to leave to get a beer then).

Festivities start at 7PM, Sunday June 16th. We’ve moved to the Opal Divine’s on 3601 South Congress. Come out and celebrate Fathers Day with the founding fathers of Noir At The Bar.

Scott Phillips is an author whose books are always at the top of my reading pile. His smart prose and conscience-deprived anti-heroes turn crime fiction into social satire. His latest, Rake, further proves his talent for making noir funny.

One of the most popular series at MysteryPeople is Taylor Steven’s The Informationist. Stevens’ novels feature Vanessa Michael Munroe, a bad ass who can get any information for anyone, and the character has already found her place in the genre in only two books. In the third, The Doll, she is forced to do a job against her will for a white slaver who threatens to kill her boyfriend, Logan, if she doesn’t comply. Taylor will be at BookPeople on Wednesday, June 12th, with Angel City author Jon Steele, in a discussion about their new thrillers. We got a chance to ask Taylor some questions ahead of time.

MysteryPeople: What was the main thing you wanted to do with Munroe in this book?

Taylor Stevens: I wanted to back her into a corner, put her in a situation where she didn’t have any tools or any control, a situation where she was both bad guy and victim, one in which there were no good choices to be made, only sacrifices, and then watch her mental and emotional process as she made the impossible choice of deciding who lived and who died, and then rely on wits alone to try to make justice out of the situation.

MP: The Doll Maker is your most chilling villain yet. How did you come up with him?

TS: Considering the sociopathic villain who enjoys watching people suffer has been used a lot in fiction, I wanted a villain so absolutely off-his-rocker insane that he came across as warm and personable while doing unbelievably horrendous things–the type of person who would invite you in for tea and sit and chat with you about politics and art while mixing strychnine with your sugar. What I personally find makes the Doll Maker chilling is that while yes, people are brutally harmed because of him, it’s not that he enjoys making it happen, it’s that he’s completely indifferent to it happening–he is completely disconnected from human emotion on all ends of the spectrum, as if he’s walking in an alternate universe.

MP: The Capstone group plays an important part in the book. What was your challenge of writing for a team when you usually deal with a lone wolf like Munroe?

TS: There are a lot more moving parts. Even in the littlest of things, such as keeping track of who is standing where, or what another person was doing while the others were off elsewhere—it’s a lot more to keep track of because if you inadvertently leave out a character, just because they’re not actually playing a role in a particular conversation or scene, it leaves a big glaring hole, and yet by adding too much of that detail it bogs the pacing down. It also makes it more difficult to do character development because when it comes to writing thrillers, you’re limited to word count and to keeping up the action and the pacing. So if you have three characters on a team, and they’re all on the hunt trying to track someone down, you can’t just stop the action and take a page to fill in the blanks. Finding a way to draw the characters with as few brush strokes as possible is challenging, and it has to fit in with the action.

MP: Because of the Capstone element you were able to inject more humor. Was that something you were looking to do more of as a writer?

TS: It wasn’t something that I deliberately set out to do, and I was actually very nervous in that regard because the possibility for it coming off as camp and cheesy was pretty high. Most of the humor was in dialogue between the Capstone team and I chose to go this route after several conversations with men who’d lived through war. I came to understand that this sort of mindset is what helps to mute the stress of a situation, so the humor wasn’t inserted as a way to be funny, it was there to stay true to character.

MP: How do you think Vanessa has changed since The Informationist?

TS: I tend to see each book as a snapshot of Munroe’s life. No matter what else is going on in the story or who else plays a role, ultimately these books are a continuation of her life. As such, she’s affected by whatever happened to her previously—in other words, not only is her childhood and teenage years part of her backstory, but the events in every book also become part of her. I find that she has softened in some aspects and, especially because of the events in The Informationist, she has allowed herself to rely on others, and she continues to make peace with the choices that she’s made. But, she also hurts more because of the experiences she’s been through—she doesn’t walk away from The Doll emotionally unscathed—and this will see her continuing to evolve and change as she progresses through the snapshots of each book.

MP: Can you tell us about what you have in store for her in the future?

TS: The Catch, the fourth book in the Vanessa Michael Munroe series, finds Munroe back in Africa and tangled up in a ship hijacking where nothing is what it appears to be. Writing The Doll, with its two distinct story lines, two plots, two casts of characters, in two time zones—each with its own pacing and action and need for octane—all of which had to zipper together seamlessly, was so incredibly difficult that I hope to never do that again. In The Catch, I go the exact opposite route. It’s the first book I’ve written that has only one point of view—Munroe’s—and in it we get to watch how she operates when she arrives in a country that she’s never been to before, without any connections, where there are people she doesn’t know who clearly want her dead.

Jon Steele, a former news cameraman, combines the real life turmoil of our world with the fantastical in his Angelus trilogy; the story of a high-end call girl and a British tough guy who find themselves in a war between angels and demons. Mr. Steele will be at BookPeople on June 12th with author Taylor Stevens (The Doll) to discuss writing the modern thriller. We caught up with him on the road to answer a few early questions.

MP: While The Watchers had something of a slow burn build up, since you had to establish the world and its characters, Angel City hits the ground running and never stops, starting with an epic battle in Paris. Do you prefer to dive right in as an author?

JS: The Watchers took its time getting started because of two things: first, I wanted the reader to be transposed to the cathedral town of Lausanne, an almost idyllic town on the shore of Lake Geneva in Switzerland.  Let them settle in, feel comfortable in what appears to be a very charming place.  Second, and more importantly, I wanted the reader to establish an emotional relationship with Harper, Katherine and, especially, Marc Rochat…a brain injured young man who lives in the belfry of Lausanne Cathedral where he calls the hour through the night and imagines his cathedral to be a hiding place for lost angels.  As the characters are introduced in the story, they have no real awareness of each other.  Slowly, as the story unfolds, the reader comes to know that Harper, Katherine and Rochat are trapped in a predestined and murderous fate.  And as the unseen walls of that fate begin to close in on them, and the action begins to build, the reader feels a sense of panic…then, in the end, heartbreak.

Setting out on the trail to Angel City, I open with a prologue that suggests AC is to be another story with a slow build to an action-packed climax, then a calming resolution to the story.  Instead, from the first sentence of chapter one, the reader (through Jay Harper) is dropped headfirst into the middle of a bloody terrorist attack in Paris.  And yes, the action never stops…all the way to the most brutal and unimaginable of cliffhangers, where the reader is left with a sense of, “No!  God, no!”  TW, AC and The Way of Sorrows is one, continuous tale.  The arc of the story and pacing of action is deliberate and follows the path I envisioned before I wrote the first word of the first book.
MP: It was great to see Katherine was still her brassy self even after giving birth. Do you think motherhood has changed her in any way?

JS: I heard from some readers that they thought Katherine somewhat shallow in the The Watchers.  And whenever I heard it, I was pleased.  It’s exactly the impression I wished to suggest.  Katherine, more than any character, is like the rest of us…someone trying to make it through the world as best she can.  And as the story continues over three books, and there needs to be room for her to learn about herself and grow as a human being.  I gave a huge clue as to how Kat’s personality would develop in TW in one scene I loved writing.  As the shadows of evil close in on Lausanne Cathedral, Katherine holds a battered Marc Rochat in her arms to comfort him.  When I wrote the scene, I had Michelangelo’s Pieta in mind; in fact, Katherine holds Marc Rochat in the same manner that Mary held Jesus.  It is a glimpse not only into Katherine’s fate, but her truest self.  She is loving and caring, supremely protective of the helpless bit of life in her arms.  In Angel City, motherhood hasn’t so much changed Katherine as it has brought her closer to an awareness of who she is as a person…and more, her place in the mysterious revelations of The Angelus Trilogy.

MP: As somebody who has a journalism background, what drew you to writing a trilogy that borders on the fantastic?

JS: My twenty-five years as a television news cameraman and writing a story that borders on the fantastic are not exclusive of each other   Trust me, finding yourself in a ditch with bullets flying overhead, or trapped in a truck surrounded by jacked-up Hutu tribesman with machetes who want to cut off your head, is fantastically surreal and murderously real at the same time.  I worked through wars, revolutions, famine and other bringers of mass death.  Each time, each place, it was as if I was working on the frontline of a Good and Evil.  There, I witnessed the slaughter of the innocent and the images haunt me still.  And it was in those places of suffering and death that The Angelus Trilogy was born.

MP: Do you have any influences as a writer?

JS: Top of the pack would be Raymond Chandler.  He wrote literature disguised as detective fiction.  Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, (considered by some to be one of his lesser works, but the book I consider to be his masterpiece) is the well from which I drew the character of Jay Harper in The Angelus Triology.  Next would be the complete works of Robertson Davies, especially The Deptford Trilogy, which I recommend to anyone who wishes to write.  Davies’ mastery of the English language and his ability it to take the reader to another place is beyond compare.  I rate Jack London very much above Hemingway, but I reread both their works often to study their method of description.  And I reread Sam Shepard’s plays and PG Wodehouse’s very funny novels often, to remind myself what good dialogue looks like on a page.  Finally, Phillip K Dick’s Ubik and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods never cease to amaze me.  And though I have only read translations, I often return to Mario Vargas Llosa’s Conversations in the Cathedral and Mikhial Bulgakov’s Mater and Margarita because I love their writing so.  I think I’d better stop, because I could go on till the cows come home.

MP: What makes Harper and Katherine great characters to write?

JS: My writing method is never to write the first sentence of a book till I know the last, then I fill in the middle bit.  Thus, my characters are condemned to a preordained fate from which there is no way of escape.  The characters, however, are free to do and say as they please within the boundaries of their individual fates.  In my mind, writing dialogue is the best part of penning a book because the words seem to spring from the personality of characters, not me.  Sometimes I’m gobsmacked with the words that spill from their mouths.  I’ll stop, reread lines of dialogue and wonder, ‘Where the hell did that come from?’  In truth, all through The Angelus Trilogy, I’m not sure I write about Harper and Katherine (or Marc Rochat, or anyone in the books) at all.  It’s more a process of the characters revealing themselves (and the story) to me through their dialogue.  I’m nothing but the scribe in the shadows, writing down their words as spoken.

MP: Can you say anything about the final installment of the trilogy?

JS: The title is The Way of Sorrows.  The story begins and ends in Jerusalem.  I could tell you more, but then I’d have to shoot you.

WARNING- In order to review Angel City, a few of the surprises in Jon Steele’s previous book, The Watchers, are revealed.

With The Watchers, the first of his Angelus Trilogy, Jon Steele set up a shadow world of angels warring with demons and their half-breed counterparts. Steele introduced us to Katherine (a high-end call girl), and Harper (an English private eye) who discovers his very unique past. In Angel City, the two take us deeper into that world.

Picking up a few years after The Watchers, Angel City hits the ground running with a scene that would serve as a climax in most books. It entails Harper foiling an attack in Paris, an act that garners international attention. On the other side of the world, Katherine is living a quieter life as a candle maker in the Pacific Northwest while raising her son, Max. Both of these events play a part in the larger picture of the Angel Wars when a defrocked priest with a scarred face and questionable motives unlocks a prophecy about a “child of light.”

While The Watchers had more of a slow burn quality of suspense about it, focusing on Harper and Katherine learning about this world and their place in it, Angel City moves at a much quicker pace. Harper charges into action delivering quips like a British Humphrey Bogart, while Max gives Katherine purpose, making her question less before she acts. It’s nice to see motherhood did little to change her brassy nature. It’s these characters and their emotions that tether the series of revelations and action sequences that out aggrandize your average Michael Bay movie.

Angel City is very much in the vein of The Empire Strikes Back as the second in this trilogy. Darker, yet more entertaining, Jon Steele gives a wider scope to his mythology, connecting it to human complexity. He also leaves you with an ending that will shock you as well as leaving you hungry for the final installment.