How Like an Angel
by Margaret Millar
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California cultists, duplicitous damsels in distress, and dangerously high stakes conspire against Joe Quinn, a private eye who is beginnnig to feel more like a knight-errant Joe Quinn is cut adrift. He's lost everything. His girl. His job. His place in the universe. A security head for a casino in Reno just can't afford to have a gambling problem. Life takes a turn from tragic to strange when Quinn finds himself on the doorsteps of a religious cult's tower in the remote California hills. show more Quinn hitched a ride from Reno but never thought he'd end up in a place like this. But a gambler has to play the hand he's dealt. When one of the cultists asks Quinn to check on a man named Patrick O'Gorman and slides a not so small amount of money in his jacket, well, that's just the sort of hand Quinn has been looking for. Thing is, Quinn soon finds out, O'Gorman disappeared under bizarre circumstances several years ago. For reasons he doesn't entirely understand, perhaps for the sake of having a purpose, Quinn begins a lurid quest to uncover the truth. What he finds out instead is that there are just as many crazies outside the walls of a cultist tower as there are inside. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
This mystery novel kept me interested right to the end... something that's getting harder to do these days. Set against the background of a reclusive Christian(-ish) cult and a sleepy Californian town, this is a story of a broke private investigator who sets out to investigate a mysterious disappearance as a favour for a member of the cult, and in the process uncovers much more than he bargained for. 5 stars!
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Author Information
52+ Works 2,971 Members
Margaret Millar (1915-1994) was horn in Ontario, Canada and was educated at Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate Institute and the University of Toronto, majoring in classics. In 1938 she married Kenneth Millar (who wrote under the name Ross Macdonald). She published her first novel, The Invisible Worm, in 1941 and she worked as a screenwriter for Warner show more Brothers. It was her 1955 novel, Beast in View, that won Millar the coveted Edgarsup/sup Award for Best Novel and the boob was later adapted for the Alfred Hitchcock Hour. She was active in the environmental conservation movement in California in the 1960s and was named a Woman of the Year by the Los Angeles Times in 1965, and in 1983 she became a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America. show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title*
- Fast wie ein Engel
- Original title
- How like an Angel
- Original publication date
- 1962
- People/Characters
- Joe Quinn; Sister Blessing of the Salvation; The Master; Patrick O'Gorman; Martha O'Gorman; John Harrison Ronda (show all 9); Wilhelmina "Willie" de Vries; George Haywood; Alberta Haywood
- Important places
- Chicote, California, USA; San Felice, California, USA (fictional town)
- Epigraph
- What a piece of work is a man!
. . . in action, how like an angel! in
apprehension, how like a god! . . . And yet,
to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
man delights not me;
no, nor woman neither . . .
<... (show all)br>Hamlet - Dedication
- This book is dedicated, with love, to Betty Masterson Norton
- First words
- All night and most of the day they had been driving, through mountains, and desert, and now mountains again.
- Blurbers
- Winn, Dilys
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
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- Members
- 147
- Popularity
- 222,177
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.81)
- Languages
- 9 — Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Norwegian, Spanish
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 18
- ASINs
- 9
