A Quiet Belief in Angels (Thorndike Basic) [Large Print] [Hardcover]

R. J. Ellory (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 2009 | Series: Thorndike Basic

Growing up in rural Georgia during the 1940's, Joseph Vaughan finds himself at the center of a series of mutilations and killings of young girls. Just a teenager, Joseph becomes determined to protect his community from the killer, but he is powerless in preventing more murders-and no one is ever caught. Ten years later one of his neighbors is found hanging from a rope, surrounded by belongings of the dead girls; the killings cease, and the nightmare appears to be over.

Desperate and plagued by everything he has witnessed, Joseph sets out to forge a new life in New York. But even there the past won't leave him alone-for it seems that the murderer still lives and is killing again, and that the secret to his identity lies in Joseph's own history.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In his American debut, British author Ellory (A Simple Act of Violence) presents an intriguing but overstuffed saga of a man haunted by a serial killer. In 1939, in rural Augusta Falls, Ga., someone brutally rapes and murders a classmate of 12-year-old Joseph Vaughn, the first in what will become more than 30 similar crimes over decades. At age 15, living alone with his mother after the death of his father and yearning to be a writer, Vaughan gathers together a group of local boys and forms the Guardians in the hope of preventing more attacks. It's the failure of the group, and himself in particular, that eventually drives Vaughan to Brooklyn, where, in an improbable twist, he gets caught up in another murder linked to the killings back home. Ellory simply tries to juggle too many narrative elements. The sheer number of characters and subplots dilute the quiet power of his prose, particularly evident in scenes of Vaughn's childhood. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

A Quiet Belief In Angels has been nominated for the Dilys Award, named for Dilys Winn (the founder of Murder Ink) and given out by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association.

"A Quiet Belief in Angels is a beautiful and haunting book. This is a tour de force from R.J. Ellory." -Michael Connelly

"A Quiet Belief in Angels is a rich, powerful, evocative novel of great psychological depth." -Jonathan Kellerman

"R.J. Ellory is a uniquely gifted, passionate, and powerful writer, and the quality of his prose-every word, every sentence-lifts A Quiet Belief in Angels far above genre." -Alan Furst

"There aren't nearly enough beautifully written novels, that are also great mysteries. Like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Smila's Sense of Snow, A Quiet Belief in Angels is one of them." -James Patterson

"A mesmerizing tale whose intrigue will pull you from one page to the next without pause, casting you into the gloom of dread and the shadow of grief until you reach the climactic end. R.J. Ellory's remarkable talent for probing the unknown establishes him as the master of the genre. The perfect author to read late into the night." -Clive Cussler

"Ellory is English, but his evocation of life in the deep South is richly drawn and deeply detailed. His characters are well- developed, and portions of the books ably mimic great southern writers, allowing readers to savor both the words and the images they offer." -Thomas Gaughan, Booklist --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 713 pages
• Publisher: Thorndike Press; Lrg edition (December 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 141042118X
• ISBN-13: 978-1410421180
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,186,686 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Roger Jon Ellory was born in Birmingham, England, June 20th 1965 at Sorento Hospital. The hospital has now been demolished. There is no direct evidence that the two events were linked.

His father having already left before Roger was born, he was then orphaned at the age of seven. His mother, Carole - an actress and dancer - died as a result of a pneumonia epidemic that claimed more than a dozen victims in the early 1970s. In 1973 Roger was swiftly despatched to a boarding school and stayed there until he was sixteen. Upon leaving school he returned to Birmingham to live with his maternal grandmother. His grandfather had already drowned off the Gower Peninsula in the south of Wales in 1957. In April of 1982 Roger's grandmother died following a number of heart attacks.

At seventeen years of age he was arrested for poaching. He was charged,tried, and sentenced to a jail term which he served without causing too much trouble. Upon his release he vanished quietly into relative obscurity to pursue interests in graphic design, photography and music. As a guitar player in a band called 'The Manta Rays' he was partly responsible for their reputation as the loudest band south of Manchester and north of London. Following the untimely death of their drummer, Roger quit the music scene and devoted himself to studying obscure philosophies and reading. Through the complete works of Conan Doyle, Michael Moorcock, JRR Tolkien, numerous books by Stephen King and many others, his interest in fiction steadily grew, not only from the viewpoint of a reader, but a burgeoning interest as a writer.

Roger began his first novel on November 4th, 1987 and did not stop, except for three days when he was going through a divorce from his first wife, until July of 1993. During this time he completed twenty-two novels, most of them in longhand, and accumulated several hundred polite and complimentary rejection letters from many different and varied publishers. The standard response from the UK publishing trade was that they could not consider the possibility of publishing books based in the United States written by an Englishman. He was advised to send his work to American publishers, which he duly did, and received from them equally polite and complimentary rejection letters that said it was not possible for American publishers to publish books set in the US written by an Englishman. Roger stopped writing out of sheer frustration and did not start again until August 2001. Between August 2001 and January 2002 he wrote three books, the second of which was called Candlemoth. This was purchased by Orion UK and published in 2003. How and why it was published is another story entirely, which if you ever go to one of Roger's events he will tell you! Candlemoth was translated into German, Dutch and Italian. The book also secured a nomination on the shortlist for the Crime Writers' Association Steel Dagger for Best Thriller 2003.

Roger's second book, Ghostheart, was released in 2004 in the UK, and his third book, A Quiet Vendetta, was released in August 2005. In 2006 he published City of Lies, and once again secured a nomination for the CWA Steel Dagger for Best Thriller of that year. City of Lies was also translated into Bulgarian and made available in Large Print. His fifth book - A Quiet Belief In Angels - was published in August 2007, and in the latter part of the year it was selected for the phenomenally successful British TV equivalent of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club, the Richard and Judy Book Club. The book was purchased for translation into more than twenty languages including French, Italian, Japanese, Brazilian, Norwegian and Lithuanian, released on both abridged and unabridged audio, and made available in Large Print. As of mid-2008, there were more than 300,000 copies of the book in circulation in the UK alone. It was shortlisted for the Barry Award for Best British Crime Fiction Novel of 2008, the 813 Trophy, the Quebec Booksellers' Prize, the Europeen Du Point Award, and was the winner of the Inaugural Prix Roman Noir Nouvel Observateur in France. Roger has also been contracted to write the screenplay by Oscar-winning writer and director of 'Le Vie En Rose', Olivier Dahan.

In September of 2009 A Quiet Belief In Angels will be released by Overlook Press in the United States.

Currently there are a further three books due for release in the UK - the first in the fall of 2009 ('The Anniversary Man'), the second in 2010, and Roger is currently working on the third which will be released in 2011.

On numerous occasions people have tried to identify Roger's work with a particular genre - crime, thriller, historical fiction - but this categorisation has been a relatively fruitless endeavour. Roger's ethos is merely to work towards producing a good story, something that encapsulates elements of humanity and life without necessarily slotting into a predetermined pigeonhole. He attempts to produce an average of forty thousand words a month, and aims to get a first draft completed within three to four months. His wife thinks he is a workaholic, his son considers him slightly left-of-centre, but they put up with him regardless. His son has long since been aware of the fact that 'dad' buys stuff, and thus his idiosyncrasies should be tolerated.

Roger doesn't read anywhere enough books, doesn't watch enough movies, and keeps trying to remedy these omissions. To date he has routinely failed.

Recently he read a book called 'How Not To Write A Novel' by David Armstrong. His favourite quote from this book went along the lines of 'The harder you work the luckier you get'. He agrees with this principle, and thus has no intention of retiring from anything, ever.

He's just going to keep on writing, and he hopes people keep on reading, and now there are people showing up to readings and signings that he has never met before, he feels that his purpose as a writer is at last being accomplished.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars over-written and full of anachronisms, August 17, 2009

By 

R. S. Lehman "StevefromStPaul" (St. Paul, Minnesota) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Quiet Belief in Angels (Hardcover)

I don't think the writing is at all elegant. On the contrary, I found it cloying. The undergraduate literary pretensions and fantasies are everywhere from using the "catcher in the rye" images on the first page to the dedication to Truman Capote. Those things presage the preciousness of his writer-protagonist ("for that's who I was, who I will always be . . . nothing more than the storyteller, the teller of tales" --why the redundancy, by the way?) whose forthcoming book at the end is "tipped to be the number one bestseller of the year" (nobody in publishing speaks of a book's prospects that way). Add to that the metaphors run amok ("Special moments--sporadic, like knots tied, irregularly spaced as if crows on a telegraph wire"--which is it, knots or crows?). Everything is so fraught. Even rough-hewn Reilly Hawkins speaks in overwrought metaphors. He describes a deceased older brother as having "eyes like back-lit sapphires." Would an uneducated Georgia farmer in 1941 describe a man as having "eyes like back-lit sapphires?" How would he know what "back-lit" even meant? Why would he say such a thing when the rest of the time he is incapable of subject-verb agreement?

The silly redundancy mentioned above is clearly part of the author's conscious style. I admit to finding it tremendously irritating; it's a cheap attempt to heap emotional weight onto a phrase for no good reason. Other examples:
". . . and so the events of that day seemed all the more disparate and incongruous."

"Death came that day. Workmanlike, methodical . . ."

". . . but in some small way an omen, a protent."

"Her hair was flax and linen . . ."

"Just for a heartbeat, a fraction of a second."

"She changed the subject--suddenly, unexpectedly-- . . ." [Not technically synonyms, but a redundancy in this context.]

". . . at first nothing more than a spark, an ember . . ." [Again, not precisely a synonym, but redundant.]

Young Joe has the same problem with his writing, which is stylistically remarkably like Ellory's: ". . . a ghost that walked with him, beside him . . ."

Other problems:
* Where does Joe get his broad vocabulary as a young man? There's no mention of books in the home (except one Steinbeck), his parents are uneducated, and there's no mention of diligent reading of any kind on his part.

* Laverna Stowell was found dead June 7, 1941, exactly six months before Pearl Harbor, but young Joe Vaughn already knew all about the arrests of the Jews and their murders in concentration camps, something most of the world didn't know much about until the camps were liberated. Even Rielly has heard about it! And Joe's mother has the whole thing already completely figured out--"Adolf Hitler has been slowly poisoning the minds of the German people, and he has been doing this long before he went to war." The Holocaust is central to the story, yet the fact that characters know of it at all that early, much less in such accurate detail, is an anachronism.

* Reilly says his father died of cancer from smoking black cigarettes, but the link between cancer and cigarettes was not widely known in 1941--another anachronism.

* Joe Vaughn scoffs at the existence of the Boogeyman but believes that a personified Death literally came along the High Road to claim his father?

* Sheriff Dearing said all the Guardians would be "grounded" as punishment--in 1941 rural Georgia? The term didn't exist. He might as well have given them a time out. Another anachronism.

* So many scenes ring terribly false e.g., his mother explaining about her affair with Kruger and Joe suddenly being completely okay with it, mature and philosophical at 14 and willing to admit his own sexual yearnings--yeah, right.

* A friend gets Joe's prison memoir published and the book prompts an appeal of his murder conviction to the Supreme Court of the United States. How? Never explained. Why the Supreme Court? Never explained--it seems to have gone straight there, which is silly for a murder case. SCOTUS awards him a new trial which he wins (why he wins is never clear).

Sorry, but this book is a mess in my opinion. Reading it was more an annoyance than a pleasure.

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful, October 20, 2009

By 

J. Shetrone (Christiansburg, VA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: A Quiet Belief in Angels: A Novel (Hardcover)

This book was a wonderful surprise. It had me from the open:

"Rumor, hearsay, folklore. Whichever way it laid down to rest or came up for air, rumor had it that a white feather indicated the visitation of an angel.

On the morning of Wednesday, July twelfth, 1939, I saw one, long and slender and unlike any kind of feather I'd seen before. It skirted the edge of the door as I opened it, almost as if it had waited patiently to enter, and the draft from the hallway carried it into my room."

And kept me reading with beautiful passages like this:

"Love, I would later conclude, was all things to all people. Love was the breaking and healing of hearts. Love was misunderstood, love was faith, love was the promise of now that became hope for the future. Love was a rhythm, a resonance, a reverberation. Love was awkward and foolish, it was aggressive and simple and possessed of so many indefinable qualities that it could never be conveyed in language. Love was being."

Joseph Vaughn's childhood is marred by murder of several local girls, all presumably at the hands of a single serial killer. These events color not only his childhood, but his entire life as he becomes obsessed with the crimes. He can't seem to catch a break, his life rocked time after time by tragedy. A gifted writer, Joseph eventually moves to New York City in an attempt to leave it all behind, but it's not that easy.

This was a really sneaky mystery. Ellory drops little breadcrumbs every so often, and just when you think you know what's going on, things take a turn. I was wrong about who the killer was, yet it all made sense in the end. The setting is also worked into the story very well... the attitudes of people due to World War II play a significant part, as well as the small town southern setting. This is Ellory's fifth book, and I can't wait to track down the others. I am a new fan.

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Could have been better, October 10, 2009

By 

Russ Spangler "Russ" (Deerfield, NH United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Quiet Belief in Angels: A Novel (Hardcover)

This was an interesting story,however the book dragged at times.How many times do we need to hear about the nightmares that Joseph had?It was repeated over and over.Every time he fell asleep we were treated to him waking up in a sweat,etc.
Also these people in Georgia knew alot about Hitler and the holocost long before the rest of the world did.For people that inteligent they should have solved the murders quickly.
For me this book could have been more enjoyable if the author cut 50 to 75 pages of reduntent content