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Each Angel Burns
by Kathleen Valentine

In high school Peter Black and Gabe Hawking were football stars, heart-throbs, and best friends. Now over thirty years have passed and Peter is a Jesuit priest teaching classical languages at Boston College, while Gabe is a cabinet-maker with three grown daughters and a wife who is cheating on him. Into their lives comes Maggie, the beautiful but elusive sculptor whom Peter once loved and wanted to marry. She has just left her wealthy but brutal husband and purchased an old convent on the Maine coast where mysterious events are rumored to have happened. She intends to turn it into a sculpture studio.

As their lives become inter-twined, strange things begin to happen. A valuable statue of the angel Gabriel has disappeared and so, it seems, has Maggie's husband. Gabe's disabled sister-in-law has a new health aide who is behaving suspiciously. Zeke, Gabe's bloodhound, discovers a blocked tunnel in the crypt below the convent. And the bodies of strangled young women are washing up on the shore.

A novel of passion, faith, friendship, and miracles, Each Angel Burns is coming in the Spring of 2009.

Who, if I cried, would hear me, of the angelic
orders? or even supposing that one should suddenly
carry me to his heart - I should perish under the pressure
of his stronger nature. For beauty is only a step
removed from a burning terror we barely sustain,
and we worship it for the graceful sublimity
with which it disdains to consume us. Each angel burns.

- Ranier Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies