Ex-Homicide detective, Stephen Shendly, has moved on after the trial to convict Devon Facil for several captial crimes. In the course of his investigation, he's learned that there are other angels who've also fallen into disfavor with God, and they exist to stir up trouble on earth. Stephen is accompanied by an Israeli national and an Italian priest as he tries to keep up with all their antics. Only now he is having prophetic episodes where he experiences the fate of mankind as it heads inexorably toward disaster. It rests then on his shoulders to puzzle through the clues he finds in these episodes to figure out just what is happening and how to stop it before it’s too late. (491 pages)
M Rating Contains: Graphic violence, adult situations and sexual content
Reviews
A follow-up story to The Serpent and the Saul, this begins with a bang and continues like a comet. Alex Bloodworth brings Stephen Shendly back as his main character, three years after he leaves the police department and takes up a new type of fight. The abilities he's acquired during his last case doesn't necessarily make life easier for him. In fact, it makes it incredibly difficult because he's not in control of when the power manifests itself. He finds himself catipulted into the future at the most unlikeliest times, where he's shown clues of a horror about to be unleashed on an unsuspecting world.
Bloodworth's realistic approach to showing the paranormal makes this more of a thriller than a supernatural story. You get wrapped up in the events and of unraveling the mystery of what's scheduled to happen than questioning the mystical probability of angels and devils living among up. There's no horned monsters or fire-and-brimstone ceremonies. Just good psychological terror and sadistic cruelty to represent Bloodworth's bad guys.
Thumbs up for this book...Angela McCoy
As a reviewer for The Serpent and the Saul, I had to review this book. Woking off the storyline from the Serpent and the Saul, Bloodworth brings back his main character, some others he worked with before, and new ones altogether. Transitioning Stephen Shendly from police work to working for the Church was smooth. Bloodworth inserted a space of three years between the end of the last book to this one. Shendly's job is to assist in ferreting out other "Dark Angel's" and stopping whatever mischief they're doing in the world. He remains a cynic about God and looks at the life he's been given as a curse.. He even wonders if the abilities he's been given were God-given or from one of the dark angel's he last dealt with. Considering that he has no control over them and they make his life a living hell, it's probably the latter.
Bloodworth isn't afraid of writing a complex interwoven story of mystery and religious quandary. There is nothing Christian about this writing. Don't read this to feel uplifted or closer to God. If anything, it questions the existence of God, or his purpose in the universe if he exists. Even the Church Shendly works for shows that it's more government-like than nurturing.
Bloodworth was able to write a great story involving religion, time-traveling, and a cosmic mystery without losing credibility. I'm a fan...Marvin D.
The Angel's Iscariot falls under several categories, but I find suspense best suits the content. Although it is rife with the paranormal of traveling into the future and some prophetic visions, the gist of the story revolves around the question of what's happening, not so much how it's happening. Readers will be intrigued and riveted to the mysteries unfolding as the clues are revealed to the main character, Stephen Shendly. Having picked up this book first, I was able to jump aboard without being lost. Much of the previous events that had any bearing to this story were carefully doled out without innundating me with a single setting recap. I wasn't lost at all. I was captivated.
This story takes the main character, Stephen Shendly, on a wild ride throughout the world, in the midsts of natural and manmade disasters as they are either about to happen or are happening. The vivid depiction of these events makes you feel like you're in them yourself, and it leaves you breathless. At the same time, there's the question of who's killing individual people one at a time and how it relates to the more catastrophic events. Then there's the question of how you can stop something that's essentially an act of God.
Bloodworth is a superb writer. His imagination is profoundly complex, diabolical, and detailed Reading this will give you shivers, yet leave you vastly satisfied...Scott Hammel
VENGENCE IS THE LORD’S, OR SO HE SAYS.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE STEP ACROSS THAT
LINE ISN’T SOMETHING ANY OF US WANT TO FACE.
Little transgressions like putting a convicted serial killer to death is acceptable to forgive. But what happens when mankind decides it can impose its laws on a fallen angel, a demi-god in its own right, crafted by the Almighty and once exalted? Should it matter that this arrogant deity defied God and was banished to earth, to walk among man? Or that the subsequent crimes of its existence were directed at humanity? Dare we even consider the right to impose sanctions on such a being when God has claimed that right.
Stephen Shendly has since mysteriously stepped away from his previous life as a Homicide detective, to join the Church in its fight against other dark angels. His team of detectives and the State prosecutor managed to convict one such fallen angel for multiple murders after a complicated case involving political manipulation of the country’s Senate. Now Stephen tracks other angels through his prophetic jaunts into prospective futures as they relate to the angels’ mischief. Unfortunately, these aren’t without their hazards, because the trips he’s taking put him in the midst of ongoing natural disasters. Among trying to survive these, he has to dodge the efforts of a previous nemesis now trying to kill him.
Author, Alex Bloodworth, writes a fast-paced narrative with no holds barred. This mystery thriller comes packed with suspense and twists readers can greedily eat up as they turn the pages to see where the story leads. Connected to the book The Serpent and the Saul, readers can jump on board and know just what this story is talking about. Bloodworth also cleverly exposes only enough to bring readers up to speed, while compelling them into picking up the first book. There is a supernatural bent to the story but not as a crutch or cornerstone to the progression of the way it unfolds, but as a mechanism to drive Stephen Shendly close to the brink of madness. The Angel’s Iscariot promises to suck readers in from the onset and not let go until the very end, where the question remains: who is actually behind the destruction of humanity through the cataclysmic events set to go off at a predetermined date.
