A woman on the run, a brutal crime lord, and three desperate men collide in this explosive new thriller from an award-winning writer.
Luz has made mistakes. Lots of them. She should never have left her daughter in L.A. She should never have returned to Tijuana. She should never have married El Principe, a key player in a vicious drug cartel. But today’s the day she sets things right. Taking only the clothes on her back, a Colt .45, and all the money in her husband’s safe, she makes a desperate attempt to escape the hell her life has become.
On her heels is a cold-blooded enforcer ordered by El Principe to track her down and bring her back. Her only ally is a grieving drifter with a death wish, and between her and her little girl lie a border, a desert, and a corrupt cop on the scent of cold, hard cash.
If Luz’s husband gets his hands on her, she’s finished, and her determination to outrun her fate leads to shattering consequences for everyone involved. Relentlessly paced and beautifully written, this pulse-pounding tale starts in high gear and never lets up.
From an author whose work has been called “violent, truthful, and devastating” (New York Times Book Review), Angel Baby is a wild cat-and-mouse chase across a sun-bleached Southern California landscape fueled by a mother’s regrets and her fierce love for her child.
“Give me a book that starts with a pulse of quickness and then hammers steadily for almost 300 pages. Give me Richard Lange’s Angel Baby. . . A lean novel that leaps and sings with hard-boiled intuition . . . His best work yet . . . Lange deserves a much wider readership. . . Lange’s prose is masterful, his sense of pacing unfaltering, and he writes about characters on the cutting edge of life. His sentences are sturdy and rhythmically striking . . . It burns you to set it aside for even a minute.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“The story is thrilling and cinematic, told as one long chase scene. . . Angel Baby is intense, extreme and definitely grimy and readers will find that’s a good thing.” —CNN
“Angel Baby starts off in a sprint and never slows down. Richard Lange is a natural-born storyteller. What an excellent novel, both suspenseful and surprisingly moving.” —Ron Rash, author of Serena and The Cove
“Angel Baby is a bone-crushing nightmare parable: bad people doing the wrong things for love.” —Warren Ellis, author of Gun Machine
“This novel should come with a warning. Because if you read so much as a single sentence, you will be gripped by its unstoppable force, addicted to the book as if it were a brick of black tar heroin. Happily, perilously plan to lose the next twelve hours of your life. The sentences flash like switchblades, the chapters rattle off like gunfire. Make all the comparisons you like—Cormac McCarthy, Dennis Lehane, Martin Scorsese—but Richard Lange is a force of his own, the high standard for crime fiction.” —Benjamin Percy, author of Red Moon and The Wilding
Richard Lange is the author of the story collection Dead Boys, which received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the novel This Wicked World. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his fiction has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2004 and 2011. He lives in Los Angeles.
