Angels in the Gloom
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
With this latest entry in a bestselling series that evokes all the passion and heroism of history’s most heartbreaking conflict–the war that was meant to end all wars–Anne Perry adds new luster to her worldwide reputation.
Angels in the Gloom is an intense saga of love, hate, obsession, and murder that features an honorable English family–brothers Joseph and Matthew Reavley and their sisters, Judith and Hannah.
In March 1916, Joseph, a chaplain at the front, and Judith, an ambulance driver, are fighting not only the Germans but the bitter cold and the appalling casualties at Ypres. Scarcely less at risk, Matthew, an officer in England’s Secret Intelligence Service, fights the war covertly from London. Only Hannah, living with her children in the family home in tranquil Cambridgeshire, seems safe.
Appearances, however, are deceiving. By the time Joseph returns home to Cambridgeshire, rumors of spies and traitors are rampant. And when the savagely brutalized body of a weapons scientist is discovered in a village byway, the fear that haunts the battlefields settles over the town–along with the shadow of the obsessed ideologue who murdered the Reavleys’ parents on the eve of the war. Once again, this icy, anonymous powerbroker, the Peacemaker, is plotting to kill.
Perry’s kaleidoscopic new novel illuminates an entire world, from the hell of the trenches to the London nightclub where a beautiful Irish spy plies her trade; from the sequestered laboratory where a weapon that can end the war is being perfected to the matchless glory of the English countryside in spring. Steeped in history and radiant with truth, Angels in the Gloom is a masterpiece that warms the heart even as it chills the blood.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This powerful and intense third novel in Perry's WWI series (after 2004's Shoulder the Sky) continues the Reavley family's anguished search for the "Peacemaker," a shadowy figure responsible for their parents' murders two years earlier, and now intent on Anglo-German world domination as a means toward world peace. After Chaplain Joseph Reavley is badly wounded in Flanders attempting to rescue fellow Brits under fire, he returns home to bucolic St. Giles for rehabilitation, but finds the village consumed by issues raised by the war. Perry's deeply held antiwar feelings are again apparent in this moving story in which "the searing scarlet of grief" destroys families of loved ones lost in the service, and the local vicar questions fundamental beliefs in the wake of mounting casualties. When Theo Blaine, a scientist working on a secret weapon to end the war, is mysteriously slain, the town is torn apart by fears of a spy in their midst. Joseph's brother, Matthew, an intelligence expert, must work with seductive Irish double agent Detta Hannassey to determine the extent of Germany's knowledge of Britain's war strategies, despite his revulsion for her duplicity. A climactic U-boat hunt and naval battle conclude this stirring work.
