Customer Reviews

Turning Angel

5 star:		(71)
4 star:		(45)
3 star:		(23)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

Other than the fact that I figured out who the killer was before page 10, this book started out wonderfully. I loved the intensity and could not put it down. However the last 100 pages fell reluctantly short by far. I mean honestly, how many people can stumble across one dead body!? Very unrealistic. The whole younger woman older man scenario was stretching it a bit too. I understand a younger girl falling for an older man, but not EVERY girl in the town. It got a bit out of control at times, and turned a little sleazy at others. Overall I might recommend it, but I have definitely read better.

With seamless, suspense filled plotting and dialogue so crisp that it crackles, Greg Iles (Blood Memory, The Footprints of God) delivers another surprise packed story. Turning Angel is a thought provoking thriller as it reveals the dark side of high school life today, educating many as it spotlights the choices and crises faced by our youth. It's pure Iles, powerful and unputdownable.

Penn Cage, writer and attorney, has returned to his hometown of Natchez, Mississippi to raise his young daughter, Annie. He's widowed and has had an off again - on again relationship with a younger woman on a high career curve. More than age, distance tends to separate them. Penn has also returned to his childhood friend, Dr. Andrew Elliott, Rhodes scholar, internist, a "golden boy, a paragon of everything small town America holds to be noble, and by unwritten law the town will crucify him with a hatred equal to their betrayed love."

Both men serve on the board of a private school, a bastion of learning that produces such outstanding students as 17-year-old Kate Townsend, class Valedictorian, tennis ace, beautiful, soon to attend Harvard. She is the best of the best - and she is found raped and murdered, her body discovered in St. Catherine's Creek.

That's enough of a shock for one evening, but Penn receives a double whammy when Drew confesses that he loved Kate and had been having an affair with her. He had planned to leave his wife, had even placed a down payment on a house in Cambridge where he and Kate would live.

As a friend, it takes Penn some time to mentally accept Drew's confession; as an attorney he knows that in Mississippi, due to Kate's age, Drew can be arrested for statutory rape. Even worse, as the full impact of what he has heard sinks in, Penn realizes that his friend may well be accused of murder.

District Attorney Shad Johnson, a black man, can hardly wait. Born in Natchez, he grew up in Chicago and returned to Natchez to run for mayor. He lost that election but he's determined not to lose another - sending a rich white man to death row and the attendant headlines would serve his political ambitions well.

Penn has little time to mull over his friend's options before he receives a call from Drew saying that someone has called demanding $20,000 or he'll tell the world about Drew's affair with Kate. The anonymous caller tells Drew to put a bag with the money on the fifty yard line of the school's stadium. Penn tells Drew not to go near the stadium, but he knows better - grabbing a gun he drives to the school in search of his friend.

What ensues is a nightmare scene like no other as the pair find themselves being shot at by not one but two people. When the money bag is picked up, Drew and Penn begin a futile chase that nearly is the death of both of them. And all of this before page 55!

It soon becomes obvious that Penn is up against some formidable foes - not only is Shad Johnson eager to pin the murder on Drew, but he's joined by Sheriff Billy Byrd and Judge
Arthel Minor. Many of the townspeople are developing the mentality of a lynch mob, and Drew's wife is filing for an ugly divorce. What becomes patently obvious is that if Penn has any chance of saving his friend, he'll have to find Kate's murderer himself.

Author Iles has a gift for developing strong ancillary characters - they're etched with precision and color. There is Mia, Kate's classmate and Penn's baby sitter, who guides Penn through the murky corridors of drug wheeling and dealing at the respected school; Marko, an exchange student who grew up in a war zone; and Ellen, Drew's vengeful, addicted wife.

While Turning Angel is without a doubt a first-rate thriller, it is also a mind numbing story of the loss of innocence. An innocence never to be found again.

Highly recommended.

- Gail Cooke

In terms of pure writing talent, I think it's hard to beat Greg Iles. He has the remarkable ability to hook a reader into a gripping story from page one. Iles knows how to write a compelling page-turner better than almost anybody. I am a big fan of Iles' work, and encourage readers to read some of Iles' earlier work, especially THE QUIET GAME and DEAD SLEEP.

I think the flaw of Iles' work is his strong tendency to design plots that are sensationalistic and over-the-top. This flaw became particularly particularly apparent when I read TURNING ANGEL. The storyline of this novel is not even remotely believable, and is overstuffed with a lot of coincidences and contrivances. Much of the dialogue is stilted and preachy. As a result, many scenes come across as more melodramatic than effective. Imagine a hypersexed version of "Peyton's Place" and you have this book.

In the end, TURNING ANGEL fails because there are very few likable characters. All the people in this book are self-absorbed, self-indulgent and amoral, with the exception of the main character, Penn Cage. The "victim" in this book, whom Cage is fighting for, is a completely unsympathetic 40-year old man who has a romantic relationship with a 17-year old girl. Not only that, but he's planning to walk away from his family (including his young son) to run away with this girl. So why should I care about this guy? In the end, I really didn't care about what happened to him.

Iles' depiction of high school life also seems to be based on sensationalized tabloid stories of raves, rampant sex and casual drug use. None of the teenagers seem believable. All the high school girls talk like 40-year olds, and seem more than willing to hook up with middle-aged men, all of whom are portrayed as chick magnets (Penn Cage pretty much has to fight off women with a stick). Much of this sounds like wishful thinking on Iles' part, and bears little resemblance to reality.

Iles' is usually good at writing women, but most of the women in this story pretty much serve as sex toys for the male characters. There's a lecture at the end of this book about modern morality, but it pretty much falls flat due to the 500 pages of graphic, over-the-top sexuality that preceded it. In the end, Iles seems to be bemoaning the moral character and lost innocence of the young, but his moralizing eventually becomes drawn out and tiresome.

In short, this book was just too lurid and silly for my tastes. My advice is to skip this novel, and read Iles' earlier work, which is far superior to this misfire.

I had heard such great things about Greg Iles and had not read anything by him because murder mysteries are not my genre. Remember, I just owned up to the fact that murder mysteries are not my thing. So, a book has to be good; no, really good; to impress me. However, a friend was so excited about his books and told me that this was just a page turner so I was eager to give it a go.

The book is a pot boiler. Truly all that is missing is the kitchen sink. The plot has no depth, teaches us nothing and hopes to convince us that the mere complexity of who could have done it makes it a brilliant book.

The murder scene becomes laughable with so many who-done-its right there like they were all invited for a wienie roast.


I finished the book and was interested enough to do that. However, I walked away from it wondering why I felt like I had to shake my head and find something to read that would take the bad taste away. This is not a good book.

Greg Iles usually writes very good books. This one, sad to say, doesn't qualify for that description. Aside from the fact that it is just plain ponderous to read, the plot is bizarre, the characters are so stereotypical you would have thought it was the authors first novel and finally, the books story line is just so implausible as to be unbelievable, and thus not very entertaining. Three stars are probably being generous. I borrowed the book from the library. So should you.

I will never forget how I stumbled about Greg Iles as an author. On vacation, I went through all of the books I brought for enjoyment on the plane ride. In the airport bookstore, I came across Dead Sleep. I just picked it up since it seemed interesting. Since then, I have read every single Greg Iles book released at least once.

What I enjoy about Greg Iles is that, while the books fall under the long umbrella of the thriller genre, they all are different. Whether its pulling in relgion and computers, World War 2, supernatural possession, legal thrillers et al, each book is a totally different beast that has Iles's attention to plot and detail. Turning Angel is no different. It is a terrific story about the funny thing called love. It also deals with some troubling issues in today's society and the way high school is.

It begins as a taut legal thriller where Penn Cage (From Quiet Game and Sleep No More) has to defend his friend who had saved his life previously. His friend was in love with a high schooler and that high schooler turned up dead. All clues begin pointing to Penn's friend as the killer. Meanwhile, the story touches on drug warfare, adolescent sex and more double-crossing and political reaching than you can imagine.

The thing I admire most about Iles as an author is his ability to make flawed characters who never come across as being a "victim." His characters usually feel real and are complicated; by the end of the novel you usually see them in a different light than when the book started. This and a meticulous plot are what usually drives his novels.

I received an advanced copy of this book to read and I found myself unable to put it down. Turning Angel is a good book. In fact, about 2/3s of the book is incredibly engrossing and excellent. Unfortunately, for me, the book begins to fall apart towards the end. Iles loves throwing twists in the plot and I usually love each and every one of them. But at times (as happened in his last book Blood Memory) the plot seems to almost get away from him. I didn't care for the last portion of Turning Angel. It seemed like too many different threads were trying to be resolved too shortly. And compounding this was more plot twists that ended up not being plot twists (and I can't talk about them without ruining them). It kept twisting too much that it almost fell apart. Also, Greg Iles usually keeps me guessing as to who's the eventual mastermind behind the story or how the story will end. I unfortunately had this story mostly pegged from the beginning.

At times exemplifying Iles's best in terms of characterizations and plot, Turning Angel also presents some of his flaws. Its a great novel. I loved it. But the ending didn't do it for me. Still an excellent read and a great follow up to The Quiet Game. I'm curious to see where Penn Cage's story will go next.

The story had a great start, but the ending read like Spartacus scene when all the slaves claim to be Spartacus. It also read like one of those backwater whodunit plays where the audience is expected to boo the villain and hurray the heroe when they appear on stage. The bad guys were reaaaalllly bad, and the good guys were reaaaalllly good. I agree with a previous reviewer that the culprit was fairly obvious. There are better authors out there that I think I'll spend my time with.

Greg Iles does a masterful job in producing a memorable and provocative page turner. The plot is intricately layered with threads of racial conflict, drugs, under age sex, and murder while a long cast of characters adds to an emotionally deep story. The setting is in the racially charged south were an accomplished doctor is accused of murdering his mistress, who happens to be a 17 year old high school student. Dr. Andrew Elliott now needs his friend and former prosecutor Penn Cage to help him unravel the mystery and clear his name. Penn is introduced to a world where youth has literally gone wild, and finds out for himself how complicated the life of a high school teenager really is.

Turning Angel is an intelligently absorbing book. It does what all top shelf fiction novels do or should do in my opinion. Good fiction first and foremost should be entertaining but with substance, provided by interesting and well developed characters. Equally important, a good work of fiction should raise questions and force you think about the world around you. The art of fiction is to make that happen through a story, without being lectured and thus providing entertainment with substance. That's why this novel succeeds as a work of art. It conjures up such disturbing and powerful images of modern day teens; you may be pulling your kids out of school by the end. To say this book is thought provoking would be an understatement. Start this book and you may as well get comfortable as you're soon engrossed by a mess of emotions and turbulent times rooted in today's youth. You will not be able put it down.

I am a great fan of Greg Iles - my favorites are Mortal Fear and The Quiet Game - in the latter we meet Penn Cage, who comes home to Natchez and figures decades old mysteries. Quiet Game had lyrical passages that haunt the reader well after it is finished. Penn Cage is also featured in Turning Angel.
While Turning Angel is not as lyrical, it still has an impact and is vintage Iles. The bit of lyrical magic happens when Penn talks about the Turning Angel - a figure in the cemetery that looks like it turns and looks at you from many angles. In other words, what is the reality, and what is the illusion.
While the book is defending Penn's childhood friend from a gruesome murder, it hits you in the face with the reality of what is going on in high schools, drugs, sex, etc. as opposed to the illusion of the innocent youth perhaps we had ages ago.
Some have said they knew who is the real killer very early on, I read about 50 authors, mostly thrillers and mysteries, and there were so many suspects, I didn't want Turning Angel to end, much less, acknowledge the killer.
You get a further idea of Penn Cage as a man, a lawyer, father, friend, lover. His integrity to do what is best for the greater good makes us want to know him better. Also in Angel, we see many characters, good and bad, from Quiet Game -
One hopes to yet deepen our knowledge of Penn in a future prize from Iles - although I keep looking for another WOW like Mortal Fear -

Friends raved about this author, but I can't do that. First it was too long and interest certainly began to dwindle after so much repeating of the sex angle. Enough is enough. I may be a prude, but I think writers should develop a better vocabulary and drop repeating the f-word when they really don't need it. The book may offer insight to what teens are doing today and parents might be shocked. Many parts overcome the sleeze and do make for interesting and exciting reading. It could have been so much better! Too many weird characters to fit in one book.