About
Reviews
Search
Submit
Home

Mystery Books for Sale

[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]


  

ANGELS BURNING
by Tawni O'Dell
Gallery Books, January 2016
282 pages
$16.00
ISBN: 1476755957


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

The title of Tawni O'Dell's novel is ANGELS BURNING, but, reading O'Dell's work, one feels everything is either simmering or burning, and the flames will sooner or later engulf all who let them. To begin: Beneath the abandoned mining town on Campbell's Run, are mineshafts whose coal seams are on fire. They have been burning for years, and, lodged in the ground, and partway burned, is the body of a teenaged girl.

Dramatis personae: Police chief of Buchanan, Pennsylvania Dove Carnahan, mid-life, mature, holding tightly to her looks, virility, and agility; her sister, Neely, who keeps her distance from the human race and rescues abused dogs; Champ, their brother, who is estranged from his sisters for years and suddenly shows up; their mother, most euphemistically described as a call girl, murdered years ago; Lucky, just out of prison for having murdered Dove's mother; Miranda Truly, lower-class grandmother whose attitude may be compared to a copperhead's; Tug, Miranda's grandson, silent, and wraithlike, a volcano ready to blow; Shawna, who has married in to Miranda's poisonous family; Aunt Addy, missing. Cami, missing. Various police officers, hairdressers, uncles, teen toughs, and other members of a close community.

In reality, Pennsylvania is simmering beneath the surface. In locations such as Centralia, Pennsylvania, a mine fire, burning since 1962, has caused the town to be abandoned. Tawni O'Dell's novel works with the real-life trope of something not dealt with, something that needs righting, yet is not righted, burning slowly beneath the surface. Some of the actual mine fires in Pennsylvania were started when officials chose to burn the garbage in a garbage dump, but below or to one side of the dump was a coal seam. Townspeople would commission a study, or pump a small amount of water for a limited time into the area that was supposed to have been burning, but lo, while studies were done and costs calculated, while a trickle of water leaked into one coal seam, a new hell was igniting.

In O'Dell's novel, ignition comes in several forms, most dealing with family tensions that have been covered over. In Dove Carnahan's family, something about Dove's mother's murder still works on her sister and brother. Her sister keeps her distance from close human contact. Her brother has disappeared and rarely communicates. In Miranda Truly's family, Miranda's hatred rages out of control and Shawna, her daughter-in-law's, frozen carelessness and slovenliness are certainly diagnostic of something beneath the surface. When the body of a young girl shows up, it is partway in a burning coal seam, in a town abandoned long before due to the dangers the fires presented to the citizens. The burning girl, however, does the duty of revealing what is hidden inside the homes of functional and dysfunctional families.

ANGELS BURNING is a traditional police procedural, with some humor revealed when Dove's wet-behind-the-ears new hires (male) fall over themselves to defend their chief's feminine "helplessness." Despite the "maleness" of the police procedural genre, however, this novel takes particular care to place readers in women's spaces: the spaces where people get their nails done, where sisters may gossip or hold secrets, where the design on a bedspread is a clue. Clues are very well-handled, as is the ethos and feel of a rural community where poverty has struck and drinking and having babies are major pastimes when others fail to present themselves. In the end, it is those burning coal-seams in the hearts of families that hold the secrets behind more than one murder.

§ Cathy Downs is Professor of English at Texas A&M University-Kingsville and a fan, as well, of the well-turned whodunit.

Reviewed by Cathy Downs, February 2016

[ Top ]


QUICK SEARCH:

 

Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]