A Little Lower Than Angels
by Marty Gallanter
ISBN: 1-929429-05-3
Dead End Street Publications
http://www.deadendstreet.com

Review from The RunningRiver Reader
http://www.runningriver.com

Suzanne Rosewell is a high powered Wall Street lawyer, the youngest partner in the history of the firm and a workaholic with no time for a personal life. She is ambitious, intelligent and takes enormous pride in her power and authority. She is the last person on earth to be interested in taking on a spiritual quest. Particularly one involving the identification of five missing righteous people, who, according to an ancient Jewish legend, "know the divine will."

But everything that Suzanne is so sure of in her life changes when she meets a mysterious trumpet-playing black jazz musician named Elias Garner, who represents The Chairman, the head of the most powerful corporation in the universe. What The Chairman and Elias want from Suzanne can neither be explained easily or within the concrete, lawyerly parameters that she has structured her life.

Suzanne is required to find her faith, to embark on a voyage that she herself thinks might be the manifestation of a mental breakdown or a complicated con game. This would be difficult enough on it's own, but Suzanne also has to contend with Elias's "opposite," Elizabeth Luckholt, another employee of The Chairman whose goals are directly and darkly in competition with Suzanne's mission.

Gallanter does a wonderful job taking the basic good vs. evil plot and giving it the complexity to resonate with today's audience. His characters routinely question the substance of what they're doing, their mental health and the validity of what they're experiencing much as any of us would if we found ourselves in similar circumstances. The writing is strong, absorbing and fast-paced and most importantly, the story leaves you with a sense of hope for both the human race as a whole and specifically for these characters.

The only fault I found with the book is a small one dealing with the author's switching from the usual narrative voice to italicized passages of present tense during some of the action sequences. I found it a jarring, pulling me out of the flow of the story and completely unnecessary since Gallanter's writing is richly compelling without the artifice.