Published: 2023
Rating 5/5
Teenage Katie Shaw is in love, and blows off walking home with her younger brother in order to spend more time with her boyfriend, Sam. When she herself returns home, she finds that her brother, Chris, has been brutally attacked by a stranger driving a red car.
Years later, Katie and Sam are now married and have a child of their own. Chris has lead a difficult life filled with drug abuse following the attack. The close relationship he and Katie shared deteriorated to the point where she has not seen Chris in two years. He suddenly comes back into her life, however, with a plea from her mother when Chris goes missing.
Unbeknownst to Katie, Chris is sober and has a boyfriend. He has been employed by a wealthy hermit named Alan Hobbes. The mystery surrounding Chris’s disapperance deepens when Hobbes is found dead by apparent homicide in his secluded, dilapidated mansion. Adding to the intrigue, the mansion has a history linked to a notorious serial killer who claimed to be able to see the future, and Hobbes has been collecting memorabilia that once belonged to the prolific murderer. Police discover Chris was the last person seen alive near Hobbes, and begin their own search for him.
Katie and the police aren’t the only ones looking for Chris. He is being stalked by another killer who will do anything to get his hands on a journal in Chris’s possession. Soon, all those connected to Chris’s past and present find themselves in a web of predicaments that threaten all their lives and futures.
Alex North’s The Angel Maker is filled with well-developed characters and non-stop suspense that readers of The Whisper Man and The Shadows have come to expect from the crime novelist. What makes this novel more impressive, however, is North has crafted an intricately detailed plot spanning past, present, and future that seems almost impossible to pull off in just over three hundred pages. But, pull it off he does before culminating in a jaw-dropping ending worthy of big screen adaptation.