Angel in the shadows

Angel In The Shadows is the second of Walter Lucius' Heartland Trilogy of international spy thrillers. I loved the first, Butterfly On The Storm, which I read last year so was delighted to be offered a review copy of this second installment. Lucius again takes in a wide variety of locations with his characters travelling to Russia, South Africa and Indonesia chasing corruption on a global scale. I enjoyed the glimpses we got of daily life in such far flung locations, however I didn't feel that this second story was anywhere near as exciting as the first. The tangled threads were quite difficult to simultaneously keep in my mind as the story jumps from character to character, continent to continent. I didn't feel as though many of those characters were as strongly defined either so I was sometimes confused as to who people were, especially if they hadn't put in an appearance for a while. I was disappointed by a few too many standard thriller tropes too. There's innocent-children-in-an-orphanage, lots of unbelievably-fast-forensic-analysis, a smattering of computer-hacking-shenanigans, and a just-in-the-nick-of-time-escape seemingly every five minutes. For a beach read thriller, Angel In The Shadows would probably be a good choice, but having been so enthralled by those aspects that made Butterfly On The Storm different from the usual mass-market thriller fare, I wanted more from Angel In The Shadows. It's certainly not a bad novel, but as a sequel, I felt it let me down.