Angel: "Close to the Ground" (2000) [BUFFY]

 Close to the Ground

By Jeff Mariotte (Pocket Books, 2000)

RATING: 2/5 Stakes

SETTING: Early Angel Season 1

TV/MOVIE CHARACTER APPEARANCES: Angel, Cordelia, Kate, Doyle, Trevor Lockley

MAJOR ORIGINAL CHARACTERS: Mordractus (sorcerer); P'wrll, Hench, and Currie (henchmen); Jack Willits (studio head); Karinna Willits (Jack's daughter/shapeshifter); Tirbol (vampire); Mr. Crook (demon); Special Agent Newberry (FBI); Orias (demon)

BACK OF THE BOOK SUMMARY: "Greed. Fear. Anger. All, technically, human emotions.  But Angel's a demon, not a saint, and he's not immune to human emotions.  So when big-shot Hollywood studio head Jack Willitts offers him huge sums of cash in exchange for guarding his overprivileged daughter, Karinna, the Dark Avenger takes the gig.  After all, as Cordy and Doyle point out eagerly--there's rent to pay.  And Willits can certainly foot the bill.  After accompanying Karinna to several trendy nightspots, Angel writes her off as a spoiled brat.  Cordy thinks Angel's too personally involved in the case, but the situation is worse than they suspect.  Karinna's in trouble and suddenly Angel and company are being pursued by an unidentifiable creature, bent on destroying everything between it and what it wants most in the world.  Before long, Angel finds himself trapped within a supernatural struggle for power, fame . . . and immortality."

REVIEW

Close to the Ground is a real hodgepodge.  It's one-third pulp detective novel, as Angel is hired as the bodyguard to the spoiled teenage daughter of a powerful Hollywood movie studio executive.  It's one-third action cop movie, as Kate investigates a spate of bank robberies only to find herself kidnapped by the robbers.  And it's one-third really bad fantasy as a super-cliched Irish sorcerer named Mordractus plans The Summoning (hey, that was pretty much the title of the last Angel novel I reviewed--but there's no connection), which is intended to draw "Balor" from the netherworld to Earth to grant him eternal life.  The three storylines do intersect, as it turns out (through an *extremely* convoluted and nonsensical way) that the move studio executive was working for Mordractus to distract Angel for  . . . some reason I don't know . . . and that his daughter had really died years ago and was now being impersonated by a shapechanger!  Only, the daughter's real spirit was also in the shapechanger's body?  And meanwhile, Kate's off doing an entirely separate storyline until the last couple of chapters when Angel arrives to rescue her.  Methinks the Kate storyline was padding added later, because it really has nothing to do with anything else but it gets way to much space to be labelled a subplot.  There's also a very dubious flashback to just after Angelus was cursed to become Angel.  All in all, it's a pretty crappy novel.  But, I give it two stakes instead of one because I really enjoyed the scenes of Cordelia getting a job giving tours at a movie studio and being just terrible at it.  Still, that's not nearly enough for me to recommend this one.