Angel

Although touted by its publisher as a ""metaphysical thriller,"" this 1993 novel from Britisher Kilworth, who in 1994 was nominated for a World Fantasy Award for his collection Hogfoot Right and Bird Hands, turns out be a run-of-the-mill police procedural pumped up with stale speculations on good and evil. Imagine the surprise of San Francisco police detectives Dave Peters and Danny Spitz when they discover that the pyromaniac torching people and places with an awesomely lethal ""white fire"" is a rogue angel who hunts comparatively benign ""demons,"" or angels who fell to Earth with Lucifer. While the two cops struggle to reconcile this reversal of good guy/bad guy roles with their own religious convictions, and to make sense of the divine's grievous toll on human life (including Dave's wife and child), the rampaging angel ponders his corruption by his earthly sojourn. These crises of faith provide a more varied texture than found in most serial-killer stories, but Kilworth subordinates their development to cataloguing the personality quirks of his characters and to throwing out red herrings galore. A subplot in which Dave's new girlfriend decides that she must die, in order to warn Heaven of the rogue angel's rampage, falls flat. Dave and Danny's final showdown with the angel is satisfyingly spectacular, but it also crystallizes the novel's problems by offering a paradigmatic example of how Kilworth, stymied for answers to theological questions, will fill the gap with a good shootout (May) FYI: Archangel, the sequel to Angel, was published in England in 1994 but has yet to reach our shores.