The Watchers
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Lausanne, Switzerland.
In the cathedral tower lives a strange boy with a limp who talks to the bells.
In a luxury penthouse lives a high-class prostitute who's in mortal danger.
And in a low-rent hotel lives a private investigator who has no idea how he got there.
Jay Harper finds himself in Switzerland on the trail of a missing Olympic athlete. A hard drinker, he can barely remember how he got home last night, let alone why he accepted this job. When he meets the stunning but aloof Katherine in a hotel bar, he quickly realises that he's not the only one in town who's for hire. She's a high-class hooker who can't believe her luck. Which is about to change. For the worse.
In the meantime, Marc Rochat spends his time in the belfry talking to the statues, his cat and the occasional ghost. His job is to watch over Lausanne at night and to wait for the angel his mother told him he'd one day have to save. When he sees Katherine, he thinks his moment has come. Which indeed it has. But not in a good way...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Switzerland's Lausanne cathedral serves as a fitting backdrop for Steele's first novel, an imaginative metaphysical thriller. Slow-witted Marc Rochat, who's served for years as the cathedral's "watcher," maintains its belfry and fulfills daily routines that he believes help to keep the cathedral a sanctuary to lost angels. One of those angels, to his mind, is beautiful American expatriate Katherine Taylor, who through her work as a highly paid escort has recently run afoul of vicious Russian criminals. Meanwhile, Jay Harper, an amnesiac operative for the International Olympic Committee who's been investigating a former Olympian's bizarre death, comes across the Book of Enoch, an apocryphal book of the Bible concerned with fallen angels who intermingled with humanity. Steele (War Junkie) keeps his tale tantalizingly ambiguous, casting it with fey characters and skillfully concealing until the climax whether apparent weird events haven't been manipulated to make them seem so. This solidly plotted tale, the first in a trilogy, will appeal to readers who like a hint of the uncanny in their fiction.
