That Angel Look

A chance encounter (in a pub, of course) lands street-wise, cab-driving Angel the ideal job as an all-purpose assistant to a trio of young and very sexy fashion designers.
But things are nowhere near as straightforward as they should be and it soon becomes apparent that no-one is telling the truth - least of all Angel.

It's tough for canny London cabbie Angel to resist the Spice Girl-like charms of low-budget fashion mavens Thalia, Amy and Lyn (collectively TAL) in this wise, witty and relentlessly English mystery. Star of a series (Angel City, 1995, etc.) that has yet to find the American audience it merits, Angel owns an unlicensed cab and knows the city well. The leggy threesome need a driver as they move from bar to bar, parading short skirts, black tights and cleavage as they show their wares to eager secretaries anxious to purchase fashion on the cheap. When TAL need a photographer, Angel produces Sarge, who is low-cost, reasonably competent and a total sleaze. Sarge soon dies with a stab wound to the head. The trio falls under suspicion as connections to white-supremacist politics and witchcraft are uncovered. Angel is repeatedly grilled by two comedic coppers, and his delivery of some TAL merchandise coincides with a minor drug war. What's worse is that Amy, Angel's favorite TAL girl, stops returning his calls. While Ripley doesn't really have much of a murder mystery working here, the coppers' badinage is truly priceless, and, with Angel as a guide, lowlife London has never been a more seductive proposition.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The eighth of Ripley's novels about sometime driver Fitzroy Maclean Angel (Angel City, 1995, etc.) might just as well have started off with Angel sitting in a pub doing what he does best- -nothing--when a trio of young ladies asks him to judge which of them has the most muscular thighs: a strenuous hands-on judicial procedure climaxing in a special prize the winner presents to the judge. But it doesn't start with this scene; instead Ripley plunges into the middle of his story, with Angel's last drink with freelance photographer Eugene Sargeant before Sarge is murdered--stabbed in the head--and a pair of vaudevillian police officers haul Angel on the carpet. The constant shifts among different time frames--the ``before'' of Angel's first involvement with the three principals of TAL fashion (model Thalia Leonard, designer Amy May, bookkeeper Lyn Buttress), the ``then'' of Angel's deal with Sarge to take some pictures, the ``later'' of the police grilling, and the ``now'' of now--jazz up what would otherwise be the fairly predictable story of Angel's drift into a twilit world of low-fashion wars, drugs, race wars, and Nazis in the attic. Modishly amusing stuff, though Ripley's determination to jolt you early and often keeps Angel's dark descent from developing the momentum that a more gradual immersion might have created. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

How does a London chauffeur wind up knee-deep in fashion designers, anarchists, and killers? Definitely not meant to be taken entirely seriously, this eighth (and, the author contends, final) novel in Ripley's Angel series will certainly please fans of off-kilter thrillers .Although the story's structure might annoy some readers--Ripley tells the tale out of sequence, skipping back and forth between the past and the present--the novel is entirely coherent and (like Pulp Fiction) benefits greatly from its oddly constructed narrative. What might have been an implausible mystery becomes a fast-paced, funny thriller that keeps readers constantly guessing, trying to sort out who's who and what's what before Angel does. A rousing success and--if Ripley keeps his word--an excellent finale to a series that deserves the same sort of recognition in North America that it has garnered in Britain. David Pitt