Guardians of the Night (A Gideon and Sirius novel)

Michael Gideon and his partner Sirius, a German shepherd, are the entire staff of the LAPD Special Cases Unit, handling bizarre and hard to categorise crimes. That's why they get the call when a homeless man reports the murder of an angel by persons unknown in a silent, black car.

So, I'm going to be honest here, I was misled by the blurb into thinking this would be an occult mystery, and I think I may not have appreciated it as a crime/conspiracy novel as much as I might have done had I not been waiting for the other shoe to levitate. As it is, whatever the truth of the initial crime - and by the end of the novel it still isn't clear - this isn't a book about an angel being murdered, but about shady business practices and the corrupt rich.

It's an odd sort of detective novel. The original crime may not even exist and a second crime goes unsolved and may not have been a crime, while the denouement features the resolution of a murder not committed until the book is almost over. There is also an arc plot from the first book, which I haven't read; my bad.

It's not a bad book, although I suspect a doggier reader would get more from it than me.