Reviewed By Liz

ISBN 0-312-35419-3

I am going to start by saying that I am not a believer in angels. The recent angel fad has passed my by and I do tend to roll my eyes a bit at the more enthusiastic angel believers. However, I am not a big believer in vampires and really roll my eyes a lot at those people who have fangs grafted onto their teeth – but I can and do still enjoy books with vampires as characters. So I was prepared to be open-minded when reading a book with an angel as a character.

The Angel and the Jabberwocky Murders appears to be the sixth book featuring the guardian angel Augusta Goodnight. Augusta is attached to the human Lucy Nan Pilgrim and is visible to her and a select group of people. Much of Augusta’s time is spent waiting for Lucy to get into trouble and she occupies her down time with cooking and cleaning. Let me just state right now that any angels attached to me are welcome to make themselves known immediately because I am a little peckish and the dirty laundry is piling up. But Augusta also likes to poke her invisible nose into mysteries.

Augusta and Lucy Nan become involved in a series of murders at the local women’s college. The murders are linked by letters with lines from the poem Jabberwocky, which the victims received before their deaths. Augusta and Lucy Nan try to solve the crimes and keep any more of young women from being murdered.

This book is good, but there were several omissions that annoyed me and interfered with my enjoyment of it. The first was that there wasn’t enough information about Augusta. When an author uses a non-human character, they need to define the rules of their existence. An example of this is that most people can’t see Augusta, but some can. Why this is so is not explained. We also don’t know what she is capable of doing when Lucy Nan or her friends get into trouble. While some of this is probably explained in earlier books, the author needs to realize that readers will come to her books mid-series and she needs to repeat some of this information for their benefit.

The second omission was of the complete text of the poem Jabberwocky. When they find the clue from the poem, the characters go look up the text of the poem to refresh their memories of it – but they don’t include it in the book! I read this book on vacation and couldn’t access a copy of it, which annoyed me greatly. And yes, the reader will be much closer to the solution if they have a copy of the whole poem.

Favorite character? Augusta, the cooking and cleaning angel. Did I guess it? No. Will I read another? Yes, but these won’t be on the top of my list.

Mystery Book Reviews by Liz at http://reviewedbyliz.com ©2007

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