I loved KILL THE FATHER and was looking forward to the second book. I found the pace of KILL THE ANGEL to be slow.

The cover art for this book reminds me (perhaps intentionally) of the highly praised Doctor Who June 2007 episode "Don't Blink".

The story, though, is much different. Not science fiction, it is a thriller set in Venice where a train car is discovered full of rotting bodies of rich and famous people. Yuck. Deputy Police Commissioner Colomba Caselli and her sidekick Dante Torre (we met this team in 2017's "Kill the Father") are brought in to solve the case and find the terrorists.

Wait a minute though, the terrorism story doesn't quite fit and suddenly we are looking for a clever murderer.

Mr. Dazieri plots and exciting book but his writing, in Italian or perhaps as a result of the translation, misses the mark for exciting reading. There is a whole interlude in Berlin that I found dull. More irritating are the frequent asides to the reader that Mr. Dazieri tosses: "Of course, Columba did worry, and she would have been even more worried than she was if she'd known where he'd gone." This is not tight English prose.

I received a review copy of "Kill the Angel" by Sandrone Dazieri translate by Word Row, Inc. (Scribner) through NetGalley.com. It was originally published in Italy in 2016 as L'Angelo. I'm not sure why we needed add "Kill the" for the English title.

The tragedy that struck the train system appears to be a terrorist attack, ISIS has even taken credit for the destruction it caused, but Colomba's gut tells her something is off. Though she is walking on very thin ice, one mistake away from losing her career, she can't let it go. Against her better judgment, she enlists Dante's help and together they find themselves following the trail of a killer, a killer who just happens to have connections to Dante's past.

It is no secret that Kill the Father was one of my favorite books last year. And I've been anticipating the release of this book for ages. While the feeling of this book is different, it is just as good. In fact, it might be better. Proof? Since finishing it, every night I've gone to read, I have this sense of anticipation about Kill the Angel…and then I realize that I finished it already and I have to read something else (gasp!). And this wasn't a particularly short book, so it isn't that it wasn't long enough. It just fed a part of me that needed feeding, I guess. And I'm hungry for more. ;)

This is a series (and author!) I rave about, and I don't rave a lot. There is just something so compelling about the characters and the storyline, but I struggle to articulate why that is so. Colomba and Dante are so beautifully broken. Watching them work through their inner demons individually, gathering strength and support from each other, patching each other up through their friendship. And then there is the secret of Dante's past, a thread that runs through each of the books, each offering a clearer picture about some things while muddying others, and the desire to know what really happened is so strong, it's palpable. And the main plot of each book is well thought out and gripping. All around brilliant.

If you loved Kill the Father, I have to tell you that Kill the Angel isn't as…thrillery. The pace isn't as intense. It's more methodical, more information-driven, certainly more character driven. It is, however, just as gruesome (which is not overly so, for me), and at least equally as brilliant and entertaining. My singular complaint is that there is no way the next book (there HAS to be a next book) is coming out soon enough to satisfy me. I'm hoping that 2019 will bring the next installment, and I'm putting it on my Most Anticipated Books of 2019 list right now.

Having read Kill the Father last year, I was excited to get my hands on the second book of this Italian author who writes crime novels quite reminiscent of Girl with a Dragon Tattoo series. While this second one did not knock my socks off as the first one did, it is still a solid detective novel with two quirky and compelling characters and an extremely topical plot line. The story begins with a deadly poison attack on a train entering Rome; seen as a terrorism by Muslim extremists, the police stir up a hornet's nest with their investigation. Columba Caselli, a female police detective with some serious baggage in her past involving death, bombings, and guilt once again turns to layman Dante Torres to help her solve this crime. Dante, a previous kidnap victim with personality quirks that could fill a psychiatrist's schedule for decades, believes the crime to be committed not by terrorists, but by a serial killer who has avoided detection for years. As we follow these two investigators down numerous rat holes, it occasionally gets a bit confusing and the book is longer than I felt it needed to be, yet I could not put it down. If you like complex detective crime novels, this one is for you.

Wow. This is definitely a thriller, an intelligent, perfectly plotted, intricate story of today. I have not read Kill the Father (yet!), but I had no problem jumping in with Columba and Dante as they reunite to find and stop a terrorist. Great characters, great depth, great story. And oh, the twists and turns this story took - definitely couldn't guess how this would turn out. Many thanks to NetGalley and Scribner for the ARC and for introducing me to this series. I pretty much loved it, and I will definitely read more by Sandrone Dazieri. 4.5 stars!

This series was a great find for me. After requesting this title, I hurried to read the first (Kill the Father). I'm very glad I did, I think I would have been a little lost if I hadn't known the full backstory. There is SO MUCH going on in these books... The characters are complicated and battered (actually, more like fairly well broken). The plot lines are so tightly interwoven that teasing the threads apart is all but impossible until the very end - and even then, there are nearly as many unanswered questions are there are revelations. The violence is fairly graphic and the threats and painful truths are darkly difficult to stomach at times. It should make for a convoluted, depressing, uncomfortable read - but somehow it all comes together in a masterful way that renders the sum of its parts into a glorious whole that kept me frantically flipping pages even when I wasn't entirely sure where I was or what was happening... This is a feeling that, upon reflection after finishing the book, feels intentional rather than a result of my personal reading style/experience; off-kilter is, after all, pretty much the name of the game for Dante and Colomba.

This book felt a little more fragmented than the first. I was equally enthralled by the action, and pulled into and through the story just as quickly (and consistently throughout). But there was something that felt just beyond my grasp with this one. In the first book, so much of the emphasis (even amidst the action) was on the characters - who they were, how they were made into who they were, and what all of that meant at the level of daily life. That isn't to say that it wasn't an action- and drama-packed book; it certainly was. But the action was underpinned by a psychological element that threaded throughout in such a way that every conversation, every nuance, every bit of minutiae felt like a revelation - even if you didn't understand but a fraction of what was being revealed at any given time. In this book, that element was missing. There is still a great deal of psychological drama - don't misunderstand - but it felt overwhelmed by the action this time, rather than underpinned by it. It meant the read was still fast and furious, but at the end of the book the "wow!" factor felt distinctly different, and I was left a little less satisfied about the psychological journey Dante and Colomba had undertaken. Despite Colomba's increasingly difficult decisions (and their attendant increasingly intense ramifications), there didn't seem to be much personality development between her character in the opening pages and in the ending ones - and a LOT happened in those spaces in between. Dante seemed to fare a little better in this regard, although the impact of the "HOLY COW!" end-twist (literally in the last pages) will have to play out before I can say for sure...

This is a really aggressive, really dark, really fascinating (both in terms of the straight-up story telling and the psychological studies contained therein) series and I am definitely on pins and needles waiting for the next installment!

Wow. This is a fast paced procedural/psychological thriller set in Europe (primarily Italy) with the topical issue of ISIS claiming credit for a massacre on a train. BUT.... Colomba Caselli and Dante Torre are assigned to untangle what happened and they find more than they bargained for. I had not read the first book and suspect I was missing a few subtlties in the Colomba-Dante relationship but it was clear to me that these two, who both have horrible things in their back grounds, are exactly the right people for this investigation. It's always a challenge to read world literature in translation as some things don't match up to things in the US (the justice system is vastly different in Italy for example) but this is well translated and reads smoothly. Its also hard to review a novel like this because of spoilers but suffice it to say that not everything and everyone are what they seem. Gilitine is fascinating (if horrible). Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. Try this for a fast paced and sometimes graphic European thriller.

Okay, before we say anything else, I need get something off my chest: that cliffhanger ending…was so rude. SO. SO. RUDE. Honestly, how dare you, Signore Dazieri. How dare you. I feel so betrayed. I trusted you — probably shouldn’t have, but I trusted you, and you just pushed me off the cliff in the last page.

I am distressed.

Keep in mind, though, this a good(?) distress. This is the distress of high anxiety that results from one or more of my favourites being in serious danger and Dazieri giving me no solace as to whether or not they are anywhere near the edge of the realm of “okay.”

If I had to guess: they’re not.

Kill the Angel is the highly-anticipated follow up to Dazieri’s previous novel, Kill the Father, which introduced us to snarky, neighbourhood badass, Colomba Castelli, and her unlikely partnership with the ever-strange and yet strangely delightful, Dante Torre. They were a seemingly mismatched pair that worked together so wonderfully both as an investigative team and as a duo of highly damaged people attempting to heal and function within every day life.

Something I highlighted as one of my favourite aspects of Kill the Father was that both Castelli and Torre suffer consequences of significant trauma in the form of PTSD-related panic attacks, claustrophobia, reckless and potentially destructive behaviours, et al. and yet none of these things feel like “quirks” slapped onto them for the purpose of being able to claim their haunted. These issues cause Castelli and Torre a significant amount of trouble throughout Kill the Father as well as here in Kill the Angel.

We see through their struggles how the road to recovery is not a simply slope up, but a convoluted road that winds around and how, sometimes, characters can also still “regress.” Castelli and Torre suffered significant trauma, and their issues with the aforementioned panic attacks, calustrophobia, and potentially harmful behaviour still plague them, yet in an wholly understandable and believable way. These are not behaviour put on them for the sake of shock or to make them “haunted when convenient” — so they can sit around a table and share their stories, yet never suffer consequences from their trauma-related issues — but things which even still cause them inconvenience or difficulty.

This book features all the great twists and turns that Dazieri brought in Kill the Father, including conspiracy theory elements, chases, explosions, terribly devious and intelligent antagonists, and more small glimpses into the past of just who is Dante Torre. Where I think this book stumbles in comparison to its predecessor is the pacing. It certainly starts off with a great bang, much like the first novel, but seriously languishes in the middle. I often found myself skim-reading large portions of the novel in order to move it along, which is something I definitely didn’t experience while reading Kill the Father.

Once the novel picks up again, however, it really picks up, and if you’re anything like me, you’ll probably be yelling at Signore Dazieri for that ending until you’re metaphorically blue in the face before weeping that you’re probably going to have to wait a while for the third instalment.

Equally as good if not better than Kill the Father. An engrossing read

Colomba and Dante are back. Of course, they are. The way the first novel ended left absolutely no ambiguity about this. In fact as much as I don't care for series, I was anticipating this one and was very excited when it finally appeared on Netgalley. Mainly because Dante is just such a terrific character. Which is, frankly, why I sort of take umbrage to this being billed as a Colomba Cassselli #2 novel. She is so not the star attraction, even if she's set up as such, Dante doesn't even make an appearance until tenth of the way into the story. Thing is, though, Colomba Casselli is a fairly average (and actually kind of annoying at times in this book) tough lady cop and without Dante all this would be is an above average police procedural. Dante is all the ingenuity, flash and pizazz of the show. Together they make a great team, though it's now somewhat soured with the apparently inevitable sexual attraction, because apparently straight men and women simply cannot have a working relationship without that being a factor. Anyway...aside from all that, this is a sequel. One of those sequels you really shouldn't read without checking out the first book. And as a sequel it just isn't quite as good as its predecessor. The novelty factor is gone, the freshness level isn't the same, the striking originality is no longer quite so striking...the first book had plenty of it all, but then again that's how it works with series, isn't it...#1 draws you in, gets you hooked and then you follow along. So maybe the comparison isn't fair, because Kill The Father was awesome and not quite as good as awesome is still pretty great. Dazieri really knows how to engage a reader, the intricacy and cleverness of his plots, the way he mixes in facts and fiction and, above all, his absolutely terrific, singular, memorable characters (on either side of the moral spectrum)...it's all really top shelf quality. I loved that the author continues with secret psychological experiments theme from the first book, it's such a fascinating subject and lends itself to such wild speculations, perfect for this sort of a story. The pacing is so dynamic, it's tough to put down. Turned out to be a one day read despite its size and well worth the time. This really is exactly what smart dark psychological mystery thrillers are meant to be like and Dazieri isn't done either, in fact the ending of this one positively makes the first book look like a stand alone. Who will they kill next is the question. Enormously exciting, extremely entertaining, enthusiastically recommended. Thanks Netgalley.

I would definitely recommend that you read the first book before you buy this book . It was fascinating thriller that left me wanting to read the next one. It sucks that I have to hope that there is a 3rd one.