Review of Death of an Angel (Mass Market Paperback)

This book manages to rise above the dizzying plethora of paperback murder stories that seem to be inundating the literary market recently, primarily because of Davis's skill as a writer and the frankly fascinating and very sad story that he tells. Although I have certain reservations with Davis's style, I still must take my hat off to him and commend him for what he has accomplished in this book. It's the rare crime writer who can keep the reader's interest going through the often interminable police investigation that follows murder and the resulting courtroom scenes, but Davis skillfully manages this rare feat and keeps the suspense level high until the bitter end. He's also able to keep an often complex and intricate story moving briskly along and never does the narrative lose its inherently compelling qualities. You'll be hard put to find a more repugnant murderer than Christopher Hightower and your heart will break as you read how he cold-bloodedly wipes out an entire family for his own sociopathic ends. My only complaint with the book is that Mr. Davis makes little attempt to explain how a Christopher Hightower comes to be the warped, malignant mockery of a human being that he ultimately became, relying instead on superficial platitudes about the nature of good and evil and shallow moralizing. Perhaps this is unfair to Mr. Davis, expecting him to make sense of a dilemma that continues to perplex and plague civilized society. It's all well and good to speculate about the banality of evil and the perhaps intrinsic malevolence that resides in the human character but it brings us no closer to understanding what it is that causes one person to undergo the psychic and spiritual metamorphosis, the repellent transformation and disintegration of soul, that renders them capable of causing such a harrowing and haunting tragedy as the Brendel murders. How can a man from such a relatively normal background as Hightower's seems to have been become so callously capable of nearly unimaginable barbarity? Does such hideous evil emerge fully-formed from a vacuum? These are questions we need to ask ourselves as our murder rate continues to rise and become ever more appalling, and our civility as a race continues to diminish. Mr. Davis doesn't answer these questions (it's doubtful that anyone can) but it's imperative that we address them.

Product Description
When prosperous lawyer Ernest Brendel mysteriously disappeared, along with his wife Alice, and their 8-year-old daughter Emily, friends in the close-knit Rhode Island neighborhood worried that family had been kidnapped. It would be agonizing months in a massive FBI search before they would know the heartbreaking truth.

The shaken community began to lose hope that the family would ever be found alive. Their worst fears were confirmed when heavy rains from a tropical storm uncovered Alice and Ernest Brendel's badly decomposed bodies--shot with a giant crossbow, strangled, and buried in the quiet woods of the town. Lying under her mother's corpse was little Emily's lifeless body, now a silent witness to her killer's shocking identity.

Like a hand pointing from the grave, the evidence led authorities to one of Ernest Brendel's closest and most trusted friends. What Ernest couldn't have known was that Christopher Hightower--a Sunday school teacher and respected member of the community--was a psychotic liar obsessed with greed, jealousy, and murderous revenge.


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