A Quiet Belief in Angels is an enjoyable, easy read, but it didn't match up to the hype for me. It isn't really a crime novel, though it is often described as such. It's more a study of a child growing up. The description of a childhood surrounded by harrowing events in Georgia is absorbing and beautifully written. The mystery element comes a distant second to the atmosphere - you'd never be able to work out "whodunnit", beyond the fact that the cast of characters is small so any guess has a decent chance of success. To be fair, I don't think that writing a great crime novel is the author's intention, so I'm not knocking the book on that count. What did let it down for me was the bizarre pacing in the last third of the novel. Whereas earlier chapters covered days, now they can cover a day, or a year, or sixteen years. It reads to me like an author desperate to find an elegant resolution to what he's built in the first two thirds of the book. Unfortunately, the last third is almost a different book and, for me at least, it didn't really work. But you'll see from the reviews here that for most readers it really did work! Maybe I'll give it another reading some time and see if I can find what they did.