The Angel: Act I

-->

The Angel is the opening novel in Mark Dawson’s four-book series about Isabella Rose, the daughter of an assassin, Beatrix Rose, who was the protagonist of an earlier series of novels. Dawson is a remarkably prolific writer not previously reviewed in this bog. How have we missed him? The book opens with a well-written terrorist act in central London, and then we are introduced to the main characters in this series including Isabella who is only 15 years old. She had a murky early life and we only know that her mother Beatrix had spent the last year of her life training Isabella in the art of being a spy. It seems that Isabella was a very quick learner. We learned that Beatrix’s last acts were to kill the six people who had betrayed her, and she got to five of the six. However, her illness advanced and left her unable to kill the sixth. Isabelle completed that final task in honor of her mother, and now she was trying to get on with her life. Captain Michael Pope who had a long history in clandestine services was on a quest and he needed help, and he turned to this girl to help him. But then there is the master spy puppeteer, a man named Vivian Bloom, and by the end of this first book, Dawson has introduced us to him. This book had a sort of “Perils of Pauline” ending, which I typically hate – but this one was compelling enough to immediately drive me to the next novel, The Asset.