Christine was twelve years old when her mom, Eve Moran, shot her current boyfriend, Jerry Santini, dead in their apartment. It wasn’t long afterwards before Christine once again took care of her mom by claiming to have killed Jerry Santini. After all, cleaning up after her mom was a job Christine had really gotten really good at by then thanks to the fact she had lots of practice over the years.

Told in flashbacks of various lengths through the book, Concrete Angel by Patti Abbott details eighteen years of Christine’s life. From 1964 to approximately1982 in various locations in the Philadelphia area Christine dealt with a life of quiet family chaos. While the book opens with the shooting that in some ways did change things in other ways it was a minor blip on a long and wide ranging continuum of the family dysfunction.

Such issues are frequent topics of the author’s shorter fiction. While multiple crimes are present in the book, the psychological relationships are the heart of Concrete Angel. Hence the labeling of the book as “domestic suspense” in this age of making everything fit a nice neat designation. Makes sense if you also believe that Faulkner is domestic suspense as there is definitely a tone of Faulkner throughout the read. Granted the book is set in the Northeast but the characters could have easily come out of the Deep South. Right down to the neat freak bigoted Grandmother who is all about appearances over everything and anyone else.

The relationship between Christine and her mother takes precedence for a variety of reasons, but there are other familial relationships at work here that don’t always have Christine’s best interests at heart. The aforementioned Grandmother an obvious case in point, but there are others just as guilty. This is not one of those families you wish to be born into if your goal is a safe and nurturing environment. A mighty good book that defies easy labeling, Concrete Angel is a complex read that pulls you in deep and will haunt you long after the read is finished.

Concrete Angel
Patti Abbott
http://pattinase.blogspot.com/
Polis Books
http://www.polisbooks.com/
June 2015
ISBN-13: 978-1940610382
Paperback (also available in audio and e-book formats)
320 Pages
$14.95

Kevin R. Tipple ©2015 ( )

Although there are a lot of crimes depicted in CONCRETE ANGEL they are not the heart of the matter. No one is really interested in solving any of them, not even the murder with which the book opens. People are interested in covering them up though. In pretending they haven’t happened. Although for the perpetrator of most of the crimes – Eve Moran – this is all just part of the way she builds a story of her life that is the way she wants it rather than the way it is. Eve is a ‘never let the facts get in the way of a good yarn’ kind of gal. Those who are under the influence of whatever charms Eve possesses willingly play their part in such coverups. And even when they’ve grown tired of her manipulations a combination of lingering entanglement and desire for self preservation means Eve is rarely without assistance when it is most needed.

The story starts in Philadelphia in the 1970’s. Eve shoots dead a man she brought home to the apartment she shares with her twelve year old daughter Christine. Within a few hours Christine has confessed to the shooting and accepted the mantle of child who kills and all that goes with it (though the ‘all’ is a lot milder than you might imagine). Before long Eve’s ‘memory’ is of the made up version of events rather than the reality and that pattern is repeated throughout the novel as we learn about Eve’s life both before and after this particular night.

Eve was born just before the start of the second world war, described in Abbott’s imaginative prose as “descending on [her parents’] simple Lutheran lives in 1938 like a tsunami”. The reader gets the sense that Eve’s traits – her wilfulness, her narcissism and the almost primal need to acquire things – are not entirely the result of her strict upbringing. Even when things are going well for her – such as when she marries a soldier from a local well-to-do family – she can’t control her impulses. Or perhaps it is better to say she won’t control them. Why should she? Eve is hardly a likeable character but she certainly is compelling.

I grew up at roughly the same time as Christine so the book’s period setting should feel vaguely familiar to me but it doesn’t. I don’t mean it doesn’t seem realistic, just not something that I recognise. I suspect it’s the gun thing. They are normalised in America in a way that still has the capacity to astound me. The fact that CONCRETE ANGEL opens with a scene in which a woman shoots a man six times with a weapon provided by her ex-husband ‘just in case’ she ever needs protection and that no one ever queries this puts the book into foreign territory for me in a way that something set in the remotest part of Iceland probably wouldn’t do.

CONCRETE ANGEL is a slow-burn of a read that delves deep into the darker side of human psychology. Though not full of twists in the traditional sense for crime fiction there is genuine suspense in seeing the relationship between Eve and her daughter develop. I can’t be the only reader who spent a good portion of the book very, very worried for the child who desperately needed someone in her corner.