Angel City

London in the early 1990s; supposedly the New Age ‘caring ’90s’. But the streets, it turns out, are not paved with gold, but covered with the homeless living in sleeping-bags and cardboard boxes, and often littered with a far more dangerous form of flotsam. For Angel, the city divides into several layers of underworlds and sub-cultures: callous crime and corruption, the growing drug culture, the seedier side of the gay scene, the young and homeless. There is also a more literal underworld where the role-playing game of Dungeons and Dragons can shift from fantasy to real violence at the flick of a wizard’s wand … But most serious of all is that Angel is down on his luck and flat broke. The situation is critical. So critical, he might even have to get a job…

‘… enough successful one-liners to keep a television comic going until retirement. Not many crime novels cause one to laugh aloud. This is one of them.’ - T J Binyon, Daily Telegraph

‘… the usual excellent wisecracking … [as Angel] takes his – and society’s – revenge for two different, linked crimes in a sad, bad world with great guile.’ - John Coleman, Sunday Times

‘Hugely funny, with a catch in the laughter; politicians should steer clear of the talented Mr Ripley as he cuts through the fluff of the Caring Society.’ - Christopher Wordsworth, The Observer

‘Angel City, featuring the reprobate ultra-streetwise specialist in smart one-liners Fitzroy Maclean Angel, is a lot more sombre than its predecessors. That is not to say it lacks the exuberant, laugh-aloud fun and inventiveness of the others; but there is in addition an edge and an anger that were not there before … and an authentic feel for the sub-currents of the underworld.’ - Marcel Berlins, The Times

‘A welcome return for a writer who is really funny.’ - Allan Laing, Glasgow Herald

‘… Angel, the bad boy who always comes good.’ - Susanna Yager, Sunday Telegraph

‘The speed and exuberance of one-liners make it irresistible.’ - Matthew Coady, Guardian

‘Comic crime writing isn’t easy, but Ripley’s Angel novels are as witty as they are deftly plotted. Ripley’s latest is as boisterous and inventive as ever.’ - Philip Kerr, Time Out

‘An abundance of comedy keeps this novel spiritedly off the rails.’ - Patricia Craig, Times Literary Supplement

Another of Telos Publishing’s reissues of celebrated British author Mike Ripley’s series of comic crime novels featuring Fitzroy Maclean Angel.