Justine Musk Blood Angel

Blood Angel

Justine Musk

Roc, Oct 2005, $6.99, 352 pp.

ISBN 0451460529

Painter Jessamy Shepard, is having her first showing in a New York City art gallery, and seven of her best pictures are of a fifteen-year-old boy that she has never seen. She believes she was inspired by her imagination. She is wrong as the boy in the painting does exist. He is the orphan Ramsey Doe, who lives with his foster family in Dearmont, Minnesota. The time has come for both of them to know their destinys.

Kai enters Jess's life quite abruptly, and tells her how she is the descendant of one of the world's most powerful Summoners, beings who are the descendants of the mating between humans and angels. He is seven centuries old, and has plenty of magic, the same kind that is locked within Jess that he will help her release so she can locate Ramsey who is hunted Bakat Akisa, an evil Summoner who escaped from prison after being locked away for five centuries. She wants revenge, she wants the world to burn and become a hell-world, where she and the demons she lets loose will rule, and she needs Ramsey to make that happen, because hidden inside him is a being who can open the realms of the Dreamlines and let the demons come to earth. Kai and Jess intend to stop her, or die trying.

Justine Musk is a great new writer on the horror scene and will appeal to fans of Karen Koehler and Poppy Z. Brite. The characters, especially the Summoners, have an interesting perspective on life as they have walked the earth for centuries. The history and culture of the Summoners is also fascinating, and even Akisa elicits reader sympathy, having been a sex slave at one time. It is hoped that there will be future books featuring the Summoners.

Harriet Klausner