The Black Angel is not an object. The Black Angel is not a myth. The Black Angel lives. A young woman goes missing from the streets of New York. Those who have taken her believe that nobody cares about her, and that no one will come looking for her. They are wrong. She is 'blood' to the killer Louis, the man who stands at the right hand of private detective Charlie Parker, and Louis will tear apart anyone who stands in the way of his attempts to find her. But as Louis' violent search progresses, Parker comes to realize that the disappearance is part of an older mystery, one that is linked to an ornate church of bones in Eastern Europe, to the slaughter at a French monastery in 1944, and to the quest for a mythical prize that has been sought for centuries by evil men: the Black Angel. Yet, the Black Angel is more than a myth. It is conscious. It dreams. It is alive. And men are not the only creatures that seek it ...
I still love John Connolly, but I have to admit that The Black Angel was the first of his novels that I didn't love. The story was certainly gripping, well researched, with excellent pacing, but for the first time, I felt a disconnect from the characters.
The Black Angel fell into the trap that so many crime writers fall into, in that the women in the novel did nothing much except serve as a plot device to make the male protagonists have something over which to be melancholy. The novel's women were all very different, but their experiences and emotions simply weren't given the development they needed. Parker's wife comes across as unreasonable and weak because we only see their relationship through Parker's eyes, Louis' niece, Alice, lives a tragic life, but we only truly experience that tragedy through how it affects Louis, and his Aunt makes a desperate journey to find her missing daughter, only to disappear from the novel when her presence is no longer needed.
I know that John Connolly is excellent at writing characters, including women, and this novel may just be the product of its time. I still enjoyed reading it and found the narrative utterly compelling. But, for the first time, I have to say I 'liked' this, rather than 'loved' it.
