Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"When you find yourself rooting for the killer in a grisly crime novel, you know you're in the hands of a real writer. Every character feels like flesh and bone." The New York Times Book Review
Review
"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
Review
"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
Review
"There are books — like Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men and Nic Pizzolatto's Galveston — that open with a tigger-snap of trouble and blast forward with the propulsive force of a bullet and never stop moving. Angel Baby is one of them....This novel about an escape is the perfect summer escape. Lange proved his poetic grit with Dead Boys and This Wicked World, but Angel Baby puts him in a new category: crime boss." Esquire
Review
"Angel Baby is a bone-crushing nightmare parable: bad people doing the wrong things for love." Warren Ellis, author of Gun Machine
About the Author
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.