The first two sentences of the introductory letter sent along with the copy of this book says “Move over, vampires. Angels are seizing pop culture, as evidenced by the popularity of Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, Danielle Trussoni’s Angelology, and last year’s blockbuster film Legion.” Really? That’s how you’re going to introduce this new book that apparently deals with angels, comparing it another book that actually has nothing whatsoever to do with angels (i.e. Angels and Demons) and a movie that few people saw, and fewer people liked (though, to be fair, I didn’t get the chance to see Legion, but wanted to…I think in the right frame of mind, it could be pretty darn awesome)? [It is! – Ed.] I’ll give a pass on the comparison to Angelology, if only because I know nothing about it. But still… quite the odd way to hype up a book, methinks. (Though, to be fair yet again, there is a push to make Angels the next big thing…at least in supernatural romance-esque books, such as the much excoriated Halo and the much-better Unearthly. Errr… wait… does that mean this particular book is another supernatural teen romance?! Uh-oh…).

But in any case, I then went into reading The Paradise Prophecy, by Robert Browne (who, as an aside, worked in Spider-Man Unlimited!) with an eyebrow (both actual and metaphorical) raised. And what did I find? That the book was a pretty decent thriller with supernatural aspects, one that did strongly remind me of Dan Brown’s work (is it something about the last name, perhaps? I now await to see what kind of thriller that former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown can deliver). So I can see why it was compared to Angels and Demons, though am still confused as to why the comparison was made in the manner it was.

The book is about two protagonists, religious-expert-and-alcoholic Sebastian “Batty” LaLaurie and super-secret-spy-agency-investigator Bernadette Callahan (her agency is known only as “Section”), off to solve a series of murders that seem to have a connection to Paradise Lost, the epic poem by John Milton. Along the way, they find themselves wrapped up in the war between Heaven and Hell, where on one side you have fallen angels (such as Belial and Beelzebub) and on the other you have Michael -- the former looking for key items necessary to release Lucifer from his Hellish prison and the latter looking for those same items to… um… not release Lucifer from his Hellish prison (has anyone ever thought of having the good guys not do the bad guys’ work for them? Just wondering.). Will Callahan and Batty solve the mystery and find the information needed to help Michael fend off the agents of Hell? (dun… Dun… DUN!!!)

This was a fun read. The pacing and action were all written quite well, it was easy to get swept up into the story -- there were times I didn’t want to put it down. Only at times, though… it did feel a little inconsistent. Part of the inconsistency was that the book would bounce around between our two main leads and the on-going adventures of both the good and bad angels, and I think that it would have made for a tighter story had the focus been on the human leads only.

As you may expect from the previous mention of how the story follows both the good and bad angels, this book is obvious in its supernaturalism, which is a little different approach than other similar thrillers take. It works well enough, other than the aforementioned scattered nature going between the various characters. It does raise a question, though, in that if you have a story with good angels (Michael) and bad angels (Belial, etc.)…what about the others? It felt like Gabriel, for instance, could/should have had a place but was nowhere to be found. It just seemed a little odd to be so upfront about the supernaturalism and yet stay on a relatively small scale (err… if “small scale” could still be used when the end game was the release of Lucifer and a whole “Hell on Earth” kind of thing).

And I do have to say that I have never studied (nor even read) Paradise Lost. I don’t think I needed to have done so to enjoy this book, but I do wonder if there were things that I missed because of my Milton-ignorance. Browne does a pretty good job at explanations and descriptions of parts, but not quite to the extent that Dan Brown did in Angels and Demons (or The DaVinci Code or The Lost Symbol, all three of which are pretty much the exact same book). Still, there was certainly enough description for me to know what was going on -- I never felt lost or anything. The whole Paradise Lost thing was a plot-device, and not really a major focal point.

The bottom line is that The Paradise Prophecy was a fun read overall. I enjoy these kinds of thrillers, and this didn’t disappoint. It may not have been quite as tightly written as others, and felt a little inconsistent, but I would say it is worth reading (particularly if you, too, like such kinds of books). I’ll be keeping an eye out for future books in this series (if there are any, but the door was left rather open to at least follow further adventures of Agent Callahan and her mysterious employers “Section”, if not more religious-related subjects requiring the presence of Batty).

   -- K. Burtt