{"id":1250,"date":"2014-01-30T19:25:49","date_gmt":"2014-01-31T01:25:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=1250"},"modified":"2015-01-25T19:20:51","modified_gmt":"2015-01-26T03:20:51","slug":"kate-rhodes-a-killing-of-angels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/kate-rhodes-a-killing-of-angels\/","title":{"rendered":"Kate Rhodes: A Killing of Angels"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A<\/a>Kate Rhodes joins a new crop of British writers featuring feisty young female heroines \u2013 either police themselves or police consultants.\u00a0 I\u2019d compare her books to those by authors like Jane Casey and S.J. Bolton, both of whom highlight young female cops as their central characters.\u00a0 Rhodes writes about a psychologist who consults for the police.\u00a0 Both her first novel, Crossbones Yard, <\/i>and this one, A Killing of Angels<\/i>, are about serial killer cases.<\/p>\n

Rhodes\u2019 detective is one Alice Quentin who has a troubled backstory and family but whose police cases take her into a whole other dark realm, as she profiles \u201cserials\u201d for the cops.\u00a0 All three women write about the tricky maneuvering women have to do to function in the very male atmosphere of a police station.\u00a0 It\u2019s feminism 2.0.\u00a0 These women are accomplished and willing to figure out how to function within the system but often at the cost, at the suggestion of these authors at least, of a functional personal life.<\/p>\n

Alice is asked to consult when the body of a murdered banker who has been pushed under a train turns out to have a picture of an angel in his pocket, as well as being scattered with a few white feathers.\u00a0 The dead man worked for a big London private bank, the Angel bank.\u00a0 When another Angel banker turns up dead with similar markers Alice\u2019s profiling is ratcheted up and she gets drawn into the highly moneyed world of the bankers as she meets and begins to date a former Angel banker herself.\u00a0 It gives her some insight into the culture surrounding the bank.\u00a0 Alice\u2019s \u201cfriend\u201d became disenchanted with the consumer, cutthroat culture where so much money was spent on frivolities.\u00a0 He\u2019s now a charity fundraiser \u2013 with dynamite connections.<\/p>\n

Rhodes has a very good and interesting central concept.\u00a0 She keeps the violence more minimal \u2013 the first one was a tad over the top \u2013 and, unusually, targets male victims rather than females. Alice herself is so fraught with anxiety and resistance to intimacy that she\u2019s sometimes very frustrating, but it makes her both memorable and, I think, believable.\u00a0 I do think Rhodes\u2019 focus isn\u2019t quite a razor sharp as someone like Val McDermid, and she also puts her heroine into some silly don\u2019t-go-into-that dark-room-alone situations.\u00a0 She has all the skills to be really good, and they haven\u2019t quite completely gelled.\u00a0 However, this is a compelling and gripping read, and if you enjoy British police procedurals at all I\u2019d recommend this one highly.\u00a0 This is a new writer to watch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kate Rhodes joins a new crop of British writers featuring feisty young female heroines \u2013 either police themselves or police consultants.\u00a0 I\u2019d compare her books to those by authors like Jane Casey and S.J. Bolton, both of whom highlight young female cops as their central characters.\u00a0 Rhodes writes about a psychologist who consults for the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[6],"class_list":["post-1250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-british"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1250"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1593,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1250\/revisions\/1593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}