Something More Than Night

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"A Tom Doherty Associates Book."
"Something More Than Night is a Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler inspired murder mystery set in Thomas Aquinas's vision of Heaven. It's a noir detective story starring fallen angels, the heavenly choir, nightclub stigmatics, a priest with a dirty secret, a femme fatale, and the Voice of God. Somebody has murdered the angel Gabriel. Worse, the Jericho Trumpet has gone missing, putting Heaven on the brink of a truly cosmic crisis. But the twisty plot that unfolds from the murder investigation leads to something much bigger: a con job one billion years in the making. Because this is no mere murder. A small band of angels has decided to break out of heaven, but they need a human patsy to make their plan work. Much of the story is told from the point of view of Bayliss, a cynical fallen angel who has modeled himself on Philip Marlowe. The yarn he spins follows the progression of a Marlowe novel--the mysterious dame who needs his help, getting grilled by the bulls, finding a stiff, getting slipped a mickey. Angels and gunsels, dames with eyes like fire, and a grand maguffin, Something More Than Night is a murder mystery for the cosmos"-- Provided by publisher.

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A logical travesty. Disappointing. submitted by eknapp on July 10, 2014, 9:48pm This...was a weird one.

The archangel Gabriel has been murdered. To keep reality from unraveling, a lesser angel named Bayliss kills an innocent woman and turns her into an angel so that she can take Gabriel's place as a load-bearing member of the Heavenly Host.

The setting is c.2070, but there's very little "future" in the story. There are two POV characters: Molly, the unwitting rookie-angel, and Bayliss, who for some reason talks, thinks and acts like a hard-boiled noir detective. "I needed a bit of the folding so I could get tight but this dame with crackerjack gams was quite the lulu. I torched a pill and tried not to think about how I'd get pinked if this went sideways." That sort of thing. And my favorite: "He looked more put out than St John's haberdasher." Ha.

Anyway, the all-powerful "Trumpet of Jericho" went missing with Gabriel. True to the noir formula, assorted heavenly thugs take turns bracing, warning off, and/or pummeling our cynical, heroic gumshoe and his confuzzled new partner. They must solve Gabriel's murder and find the Trumpet and time is running out. It's a clever twist on a classic formula. However...

SPOILING IT ALL AHEAD






There needed to be some logic to Bayliss's Raymond Chandler-inspired persona. The setting doesn't account for it. No other character follows his script. But the big plot twist, instead of justifying it, makes it worse: Bayliss was the bad guy all along. There is no reason whatsoever for Bayliss's hard-boiled affectations--and in fact it's his adherence to the formula that gives him away to the good guys, so why do it at all? Furthermore, since he's the bad guy, NONE OF HIS CYNICALLY HEROIC FIRST-PERSON POV CHAPTERS ACTUALLY HAPPENED; literally half the book up to that point was, well, malarkey. Flim-flam.

The mystery was decent, the characters reasonably three-dimensional, the catchy noir lingo a lot of fun. But there's no coming back from that kind of climactic fail.