An unidentified body points Wager to a radical religious sect A year ago, homicide detective Gabe Wager had a man killed. Though Wager feels no guilt at doing away with an evil man, his partner, Max Axton, is disgusted, and has hardly spoken to him for a year. Now Wager and Axton have to work together to solve a baffling crime that takes them to the border of Colorado-and the limits of human faith. They find the body on Denver's outskirts, stripped of identifying marks and clutching a drawing of a sword-bearing angel. The picture is a clue: the calling card of a boastful killer. It leads Wager and Axton to the state's desolate fringe, where a radical Mormon group refuses to follow its church into the modern world, killing to protect their way of life.
"Another high-class episode in the dangerous life of . . . Gabriel Wager. Wager continues to deepen as a character. His credo is spelled out here: 'Life was as casual as death.'"
The New Yorker
"[Burns provides] fascinating insights into the Mormon Church as well as its fanatical offshoots. . . . The Avenging Angel is a winner . . . and it's good literature."
Daily Press
"The writing here is taut and stylish; the landscape 'painting' graphic, evocative, finely rendered; the narrative momentum unremitting."
