Tread of Angels, by Rebecca Roanhorse
What a marvelous page-turner of an “Angels and Devils in the
Weird West” murdeer mystery adventure! Rebecca Roanhorse does a brilliant job
dropping the reader into an Old-West-That-Never-Was, a town that mines divinity
as an energy-source mineral, populated by the Fallen descendants of demons and
ruled by the snobbish ruling-class human Elects and their police arm, the
Virtues.
In the late 1880s. a cardsharp named Celeste and her sister
Mariel, an immensely talented singer, eke out a living. They’re both Fallen,
although Celeste has managed to hide her outcast status. She’s also trying to
forget an intensely passionate affair with a demonlord. Her world shatters when
Mariel is arrested for the murder of a Virtue, and the only way to save her is
for Celeste to become an untrained defense attorney, a “Devil’s Advocate” or advocatus
diaboli. To make matters worse, she has only a short time, not nearly
enough to investigate, and she’s managed to put herself in debt to her demon
lover.
The story swept me up on the first page and didn’t let go
until the surprising, ambivalent-but-satisfying conclusion. I especially admired
how Roanhorse plomped me into her world without big chunks of exposition. Instead,
she uses character, action, and nuanced detail to construct a world as seen
through the eyes of an unreliable but highly sympathetic protagonist.
Highly recommended.
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