A particularly grisly murder seems to have links with satanism, and the police are approached by a guy who runs some sort of club dedicated to investigating evil, who wants to help. More killings occur. The club members reveal that they are dedicated to pursuing the activities of satan, whose has agents in this world that appear as human beings but are actually descendents of fallen angels, as foretold in the apocryphal book of Enoch.

I got this because I wanted an easy read, and it was certainly that. Not bad writing, but not at all demanding - I got through 400-odd pages in a couple of days, which made a nice change after slogging through Personal Injuries at the rate of something like two pages per night.

The plot was nothing special - there were various back-stories going on about the lead cop's parents having affairs, and the medical examiner having an illicit relationship with a priest. I think these must be recurring characters in a series of Gerritsen's novels, but I don't particularly remember them from other books.

The crimes themselves weren't very interesting either - there was a fair amount of guff about secret prophetic books and the Nephilim etc., but that sort of fizzled out without much mention as the murderer was found. I think maybe it would have been more effective if the crime scenes hadn't been described - as the detective is approaching the first one, she's warned that this is something really bad, and has to walk past other officers who are being sick etc. - but Gerritsen isn't a good enough writer to make the descriptions vivid enough to warrant this kind of build-up.

Easy read to relax with, but two days later I've forgotten most of it.

Completed : 29-Aug-2009