Jessie is dead. She shot herself while on the phone to Max. Juli Zeh's bestselling debut novel brings us a gripping, sinister tale of cocaine, heart wrenching love and political corruption. Max, while grieving for his criminal girlfriend Jessie, slides into a drug-induced oblivion, his personal and professional descent assured. As he probes into Jessie's past, a sinister web of conspiracy is drawn around him, with a cast of international lawyers, drug dealers, UNO politicians, Balkan war heroes and mass murderers. Zeh exposes the fragile line between the safe normality of life, and its madness, crime and cruelty. Part love story, part crime thriller, Zeh's novel is by turns grittily contemporary and dense with poetic imagery. The complex plot unfolds with a wickedly ingenious structure, full of bizarre twists and turns: reading it is deeply satisfying, like solving a sophisticated riddle. Eagles and Angels holds you hostage from the first to last page.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
A haze of drug addiction and anomie hangs over this bleak tale of obsessive love and underworld dealings, the first novel by a young German writer. When Max, a successful Viennese attorney in his early 30s, is left desperate and forlorn following the suicide of his girlfriend, Jessie, he calls Clara, a 23-year-old radio host. Far from lending a sympathetic ear-when Max recalls that Jessie shot herself while on the phone with him, Clara says, "[S]urely there must have been blood and brains all over it"-she wants his story for her psychology dissertation. In exchange for being put up at her apartment, Max finally agrees to talk into a DAT recorder between lines of coke. As he tells it, he first met Jessie at boarding school, where she was dating his roommate, Shershah, and dealing coke for her sinister father, Herbert, and brother, Ross. Tiny and unstable, Jessie reenters Max's life 12 years later and sucks him into her downward spiral. As Max continues spinning his tale on tape, he begins to uncover larger conspiracies and connections that threaten not only him but also his odd partnership with Clara and his memories of Jessie. Folding the story of Max's tortured love for both women into a larger chronicle of European drug smuggling and related war crimes, Zeh weaves a nightmarishly effective tale of personal and societal collapse.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Max is a gifted young international lawyer in an expanding Europe, but his past as a delinquent teenager reasserts its hold on his life when Jessie, his fragile, drug-smuggling childhood friend/crush, shoots herself while on the phone with him. Clarity about the past comes only through massive cocaine consumption and Clara, an angry twentysomething radio psychologist, who makes Max's psychosis her dissertation topic. Returning to Vienna, Max collects clues of Jessie's life as his own unravels, and pieces together a sinister past--and present--where European expansionism and international crime live symbiotically, and where the good guys may be more complicated than they seem. Curiously, and humorously, the key to the mystery of Jessie may be her beloved dog, named Jacques Chirac. Zeh's intriguing debut is part crime drama, part love story, and part drug novel, and it functions well as each of these. What makes it a great book--and probably why it won last year's German Book Award for most successful debut novel--is its skillful yet subtle integration of the politics of expansion into both foreground and background. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
complex, lovely, and a little scary,
By A Customer
This review is from: Eagles and Angels (Paperback)
Eagles and Angels offers big themes, mutable characters and a narrative voice as punchy as our coke-addled tour guide, Max. Through flashbacks and dispatches from the present-tense, Max leads us through an intricate story of unrequited love and international intrigue - but proves an unreliable narrator. He's a moral relativist, sometimes cruel, and someone who well understands the power of information, and the fun in hoarding it. The book's other characters are as intriguing as Max - realistic in their reliance on emotion over logic, the rapidity with which their feelings change, and their ability to be obnoxious. Jessie, for example, often seems a "silly cow" (per Clara's assessment) - and I found myself periodically wishing that I could give Max a good punch in the mouth. I found this to be a highly enjoyable book - visceral, thought-provoking, ambitious - and recommend it highly. Last note:...
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