Excerpt.....  and Reviews

"I believe and hold it as the fundamental article of Christianity, that I am a fallen creature; that I am myself capable of moral evil, but not of myself capable of moral good, and that Guilt is justly imputable to me prior to any given act, or assignable moment of time, in my Consciousness. I am born a child of Wrath." - .
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notebooks, 1810

Friday 9th February, early morning

For months afterwards, awake and asleep, Faraday dwelt on that final second and a half. He'd measured it by eye, standing on the pavement in the chilly dawn, trying to imagine something solid falling from the roof above. A rock, a parcel of some kind, flesh and blood, it made no difference. You got to the edge, you let go, and gravity did the rest. Was it true that your heart stopped the moment your plunge began? Did God have a way of sparing you the onrushing pavement below? He rather doubted it.

The impact had split the back of her skull wide open, spilling brain matter onto the wet paving slab, florets of thick grey jelly pinked with blood and matted with hair. More blood had trickled from her ears, pooling blackly amongst the tufts of grass growing between the slabs. She'd been wearing jeans and a green cotton sweatshirt, far too skimpy for the middle of winter, and her thin, outstretched wrist was circled with a silver bracelet, hung with tiny charms. Her eyes, oddly, were still open in her unmarked face. Lovely eyes. Green. Ignore the wreckage at the back of her head and she might just have woken up.

While Scenes of Crime wrestled a heavy plastic screen into position around the body, Faraday took the lift to the 23rd floor, and then found the stairs that led up to the roof. The warden, a blonde woman in her fifties, was talking to the P/C standing guard at the open door. Faraday stepped carefully past them and out on to the roof, ducking to avoid the lattice of washing lines that criss-crossed the drying area. The roof space was big and walled on all four sides: brickwork up to chest-level and then a metal grille to open out the views. Above the grille there was another four feet or so of bricks but corners and crevices offered a purchase for hands and legs, and to a certain kind of youngster the challenge of the climb would have been irresistible.

The girl lay on the pavement towards the corner of the building on the western side of the block and Faraday began to haul himself up towards the parapet above her, curious to put the climb to the test. He wasn't good with heights, never had been, but there was something in the girl's face that obliged him to try, and he finally managed it, standing cautiously upright on top of the encircling wall before peering down.

The sheerness of the drop dizzied him. Even the undertaker's van, backing slowly towards the cluster of tiny figures at the kerbside, seemed too dinky to be real and as his stomach churned he had to find something else to look at. Several floors below him, infinitely bigger, a pair of black-headed gulls were chasing a third. His eye followed them as they banked and soared on the chill February wind and he found himself wondering whether the girl, too, might have glimpsed some bird or other in the darkness as she gazed down. Had she met this terrible death on purpose, garnishing her final moments with a swallow dive? Had she spread her arms, taking one last lungful of air, standing there? To the alarm of the warden, Faraday tried it himself, arms out wide, chin up, ignoring the drop, recognising at once where the image led.

A bird on the wing, he thought. Or the figure on the cross betrayed and crucified.

© Graham Hurley 2002

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Reviews

It is difficult to believe that Graham Hurley could write a better novel than The Take, but he's done it. Angels Passing is a brilliantly layered and nuanced story. Tough, gritty and unsparing, it is a hardboiled detective novel with a particular edge.
- Margaret Cannon, Toronto Globe and Mail.

Angels Passing is the latest in Graham Hurley's richly detailed series of police procedurals set in the nasty English inner city of Portsmouth. It's intricacy works and makes for absorbing reading.
- Jack Batten, Toronto Star.

Graham Hurley's Angels Passing is the third entry in this impressive series and presents an even bleaker view of Portsmouth than its predecessors - this is an inner city Britain in which children live almost as feral animals and in which the failed policies of prohibition leave the police and social services able to do little more than tinker at the margins of a society which seems to be rushing to its doom. With the grimness of its concerns and the liveliness of its writing, Hurley is in some ways a South Coast answer to Ian Rankin - before long, I suspect, he'll be just as famous."
- Mat Coward, London Morning Star.

Angels Passing is a realistic depiction of modern police work with no glamorous high-profile cases to attract the national press, just vicious criminals fighting each other and the police, and an underworld inhabited by drug-addicted teenagers. It's strong stuff and makes gripping, and at times grim reading.
- Susanna Yager, Sunday Telegraph.

Angels Passing is one of the best British crime novels that I have read in the past few years and Faraday looks like being an enduring character, more human than Rebus and also more interesting because we see less of him than the other members of the team. Portsmouth seems an unusual town in which to set a detective saga but the isolated nature of the town gives the novel a taut and claustrophobic feel that merely adds to the tension. An excellent police procedural.
- Waterstone’s Review

An ambitious police procedural epic set in the author’s home town of Portsmouth, this could well be the book that drags Graham Hurley into the rarefied atmosphere of crime bestsellerdom in the wake of Ian Rankin and Val McDermid. The third in the DI Joe Faraday series spans a momentous week in the life of the local major crimes squad, following the fall of a 14 year-old girl from the top of a tower block and the discovery of a shadowy figure captured on CCTV. The often sordid life of a large British city is caught with pinpoint accuracy, together with a host of realistic characters on both sides of the law. The picture of a society in freefall, littered with wrecked families, drugs and corruption, feels painfully true to life, and the conflicts facing the investigating policemen betray true emotion and pathos. Hurley was previously a TV documentary maker and his touch stays assured and analytical throughout. A splendid achievement.
- Maxim Jakubowski, The Guardian

With Angels Passing, his third novel in the Joe Faraday series, Graham Hurley has taken another step forward and merits comparison with some of the best writers in this branch of the genre. Like John Harvey’s Resnick, Faraday dominates the narrative, and it is the lonely insecurity of the man, together with his essential morality, which act as the anchor for the series. The portrait of Portsmouth, its underworld, and its youth becomes all the more stark when set against the ineffective pretence of the police, and their own internal politics. The crimes, as such, get solved, but it is the realisation of Portsmouth’s mean streets which make this series so good. And as for Hurley – he seems to be getting more ambitious with each successive book.
- Michael Carlson, Crime Time

Les Anges Brises de Somerstown (Angels Passing) est un polar que l’on ne peut lacher du debut a la fin…. (Angels Passing is a cop thriller you can’t put down from start to finish…)
Femme Actuel