Worse Angels by Laird Barron

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on May 26, 2020

Isaiah Coleridge was a more interesting character during the previous two books in this series, when he was still a mob enforcer. As an enlightened thug, he had a unique personality. Now that he’s a private detective, he’s just another private detective, albeit one with a colorful background. He has gone straight to prove to himself and everyone else that he can follow a better path, which stops just short of being self-righteous. Fortunately, he hasn’t crossed that line. He wants to kick the dopamine rush that comes from hitting people, but he regularly encounters people that try to hit him, so what choice does he have? His thuggish instincts are still at war with his better nature, and every now and then his worse angel allows barely controlled mayhem to rule. He proves that late in the novel by assuring that some troublesome people will never make trouble again. That’s the Coleridge of old.

My ultimate issue with Worse Angels is not that Coleridge has gone soft — by the end of the novel, it is clear that he is still a wrecking ball — but that the plot veers in the direction of the supernatural. With the exception of John Connolly, I prefer my thriller writers to stay grounded in reality. Granted, there might be non-supernatural explanations for certain phenomenon, but they are about as plausible as gaining the ability to climb walls after being bitten by a radioactive spider.

Coleridge is improbably well read for a thug. In addition to summoning “the literary specters of Holmes and Mason; Poirot and Fletcher,” he quotes ancient Greeks and is familiar with history and mythology and philosophy. At least he has something to talk about. Unlike the thriller protagonists who describe their weapons in loving detail before running out of conversation, Coleridge ponders the mystery of existence, including the knowledge that all we have is “that fragile guttering flame between us and the endless void.” I probably like him because, despite his dark nature, he is good to dogs, only kills jerks, and detests the “righteous racism craze” that is “sweeping the nation.” For a hit man, he isn’t all bad.

Coleridge is hired by an ex-NYPD cop named Badja Adeyemi who worked as an assistant and bodyguard to Sen. Gerald Redlick, owner of a real estate business called the Redlick Group. The corporation laundered dirty Russian money. Adeyemi expects to be killed by Russian gangsters or arrested by the feds. Before that can happen, he hires Coleridge to look into the death of his nephew, Sean Pruitt, who was working on the Jeffers Large Particle Collider Project, an expensive and corrupt endeavor in which Redlick invested. Pruitt supposedly committed suicide by plunging down a shaft, but Adeyemi thinks there is a connection between that death and eight fatal accidents that occurred before construction came to a halt.

The first half of the novel drags a bit as Coleridge investigates the death with his associate Lionel Robard. The story take a strange turn when he encounters the Mares of Thrace, which seems to be a cult consisting of members who eat spoiled meat and dress like they are still in high school. The members become weirdly powerful when they make strange faces, perhaps owing to radiation, hence the Spiderman reference. None of that made much sense to me. The plot thread struck me as an unwelcome departure from the more reality-based stories Laird Barron told in the first two Coleridge books.

To be fair, I was feeling distracted when I read Worse Angels. I’m conscious of the fact that my mood affects my reading. Maybe Worse Angels is just as good as the earlier novels in the series and if I’d read it in a different week, I would have been more enthused. And to be fair, when the action picked up in the second half, I was drawn into the story. If nothing else, Barron’s sharp-edged prose is enough to keep me hooked on the series. I nevertheless hope the next book returns to the standard set by the first two.

RECOMMENDED