Ian Tregillis is an interesting writer. His ideas are clearly not the product of a sane mind. I enjoyed his first book, Bitter Seeds (my review), but wasn’t happy with the additional books in that trilogy. Then he comes along with Something More Than Night. The book advertises itself as a supernatural, noir mystery with a main character who influenced by Sam Spade. And the mystery? Who killed the Angel Gabriel? With a plot like that, there was nothing that could stop me from reading it. And I loved it. Let’s check it out.

Bayliss is an angel who’s been unusually influenced by Raymond Chandler. He sees the world as if he’s Sam Spade and, like Sam Spade, he has a case. The angel Gabriel has died and Bayliss has to find someone from the mortal world to become an angel. But it’s never as simple as that. He finds his target and then accidentally grabs the wrong person. He tries to recover from this and investigate the death of Gabriel, but the more he looks the more he realizes that there are no mistakes and that this is much bigger (and much more dangerous) than he realized.

Molly is pissed that Bayliss selected her. She was trying to get her brother to rehab and now she’s an angel and Bayliss is pretty much just dumping her off to figure things out on her own. She starts making mistakes and enemies, but soon realizes that she might not just be a pawn in the great mystery.

Overall, it’s a wonderful metaphysical story that starts as a weird twist on a noir story and goes much deeper than expected. I’ve been hot and cold on Tregillis previously, but truly this is a wonderful story. I’m sure if I had more metaphysical knowledge about angels and heaven, I’d find a lot more depth in parts of the story. But Tregillis makes sure the reader doesn’t get lost along the way. Recommended.