Ladder of Angels — Brian Thompson

As PI Patrick Ganley muses in the early stages of his search for a young woman, in some ways, a missing person is simply a person sought by somebody else. The searchers are the story. That's true enough in Thompson's impressive new novel, a complex foray into the primitive desires that drive the English Pelling family: Peter; estranged wife Diane; their daughter, Melissa; and Pilar, Peter's housekeeper and lover. Melissa Pelling, recent inheritor of half a million pounds, is haphazardly sought by her father, who hires Ganley (I can spend enough of your money to salve your conscience, or I can find her. It's up to you, Ganley tells him). Her absent mother, Diane, a sexual free spirit, would rather not face the situation at all. The Pelling family history shades beyond the dark to the ultraviolet, incorporating sex for hire (real and virtual), rape and sodomy, unfettered social climbing and an overarching inability of people to connect with one another except through deceit. Ganley enters this poisonous atmosphere, giving the novel its necessary moral center, fending off physical threats and emotional assaults. Thompson (Bad to the Bone) offers up a harrowing read that is blunt (The evidence of her bedroom suggested a big girl with large chunks of her brain missing), scathing (I could imagine Pilar as the Philippine Lady Macbeth) and written with a sweetness of language that cuts intriguingly against the moral decay at the story's center. (Nov.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.