Night Angel

by Kate Green

Maggie Shea returns to San Francisco with five college friends after twenty years to memorialize a missing friend, and uncovers troubling questions about Lora's disappearance

Genres: Fiction, Mystery

288 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

Reviews

[Rainbowgardener · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a re-read from a long time ago. Book was written in 1989 and I probably read it when it was new and it spoke to me more back then. To start with 1989 was pre-laptop, cell phone, mobile devices. Night Angel is a mystery, suspense, thriller, but the characters have to keep doing things like finding a gas station to use a pay phone, or they are trying to call for help, but the phone line has been cut, or they are badly wounded and trying desperately to reach the receiver "dangling from its spiral cord." (Haven't you seen all these scenes in old movies?) It's amazing how dated that makes a less than thirty year old book seem.

The book follows a bunch of people who were hippies, living together in a communal household, in Berkeley, CA in 1969-70 and are now being brought back together by death/funeral and other circumstances. I was a hippie and lived in Berkeley in exactly that time period, so I know exactly what the streets she describes looked like. In 1989, it was probably very cool to have all that brought back to life for me. Thirty years later it's kind of like looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Although I still have some nostalgia for it, it seems very far away and distant/ antique. Less power to move me and more strange.

As far as the mystery, she keeps drawing so many red herrings across your path, it finally gets irritating: Look over here! No, now look over here! Now look at this one! Begins to strain credulity.

[Barbara Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read Night Angel when it was originally published in 1989, and on a whim I recently tracked down a copy. This is an absorbing mystery involving a charismatic circle of Berkeley/Haight Ashbury friends who come back together when one of them disappears, dies, and then is found. The mystery centers on a shadow box of late 1960s memorabilia, but now, nearly 35 years later, the story creates another shadow box of their lives in the late 1980s. Hippie and yuppie evoke both timeframes with wands of wood and neon.

[LJ · Rating 1 out of 5]

Night Angel - NR
Green, Kate

I slogged my way through this.

[MaryAlice · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked this author's first book, way back in the 80's....alas, her second one was not as good.