Book review: "Angelology"

Trussoni, Danielle. Angelology. New York: Viking, 2010.

This sprawling fantasy is at its best when it heads back into the late 1930s and early 1940s to tell the tale of angelologists battling the Nephilim, the amoral and bloodthirsty descendants of the Watchers. The parts set in 1999 are very good, too, as the main characters -- a nun in charge of a library and a researcher -- follow clues to solve a decades-old mystery about a lost artifact. Like A Discovery of Witches, Angelology does not argue for the author's ability to weave a suspenseful tale, but the writing is straight-forward and often moving. The characters are compelling as the characters begin to discover who they really are. Anyway, it's a type of Lost Book novel (more accurately a lost thing novel), but it operates on a more literary level than The DaVinci Code and even was a NY Times Notable Book in 2010. So I recommend it.