There Came Two Angels and
The Blue Scorpion
I wouldn’t normally review two books at once, especially by the same author, but after I read Julia Lieber’s most current release, The Blue Scorpion, I had to read her earlier book, There Came Two Angels.
Why? Because The Blue Scorpion was so good. Why am I including the first book in this review? Because I don’t want anyone to make the same mistake I did and read them out of order.
As you turn the 247 pages of Scorpion, Lieber has a way of letting her readers really get inside her characters, especially main character Loy Lombard, a former detective turned private eye. But even so, I felt something was missing, some piece of the puzzle that make up her characters, which includes her partner, Sam McLean, Mike Church, Sig Mashburn, Chris Campbell and Tyler Rhodes.
Without a doubt, Lieber’s yarn is spun so well in Scorpion that you don’t necessarily have to read Angels first to get into the charactes, so much so that you want to know more about them and how they met and fit together.
For example, in the beginning of Scorpion we know Campbell is the girlfriend of Lombard. We know Campbell is a park ranger. But we don’t know exactly how these two people, who seem so opposite, met. For that story you have to read Angels.
I’m not much of a detective, mystery reader, with the exception of John Grisham, but I can’t wait for Lieber to produce her third Loy Lombard mystery. Yes, both books are just that good.
Angels is the story of a right-wing, conservative senator who is found by police naked, except for a towel; covered in blood, and sitting next to the body of a murdered gay street hustler.
Scorpion finds Lombard thrust once again into a high-profile criminal case as she and her partner search for the connection between a missing Russian mail-order bride and a shadowy, seductive “ice queen,” all the while searching for a woman worth fighting for.
There Came Two Angels
The Blue Scorpion
Julia Lieber
Alyson Books
(as published in Family & Friends Magazine, July 2005)
