Margaret Millar: How Like an Angel (USA 2016)

From the Publisher:
California cultists, duplicitous damsels in distress, and dangerously high stakes conspire against Joe Quinn, a private eye who is beginning to feel more like a knight-errant

Joe Quinn is cut adrift. He's lost everything. His girl. His job. His place in the universe. A security head for a casino in Reno just can't afford to have a gambling problem.

Life takes a turn from tragic to strange when Quinn finds himself on the doorsteps of a religious cult's tower in the remote California hills. Quinn hitched a ride from Reno but never thought he'd end up in a place like this. But a gambler has to play the hand he's dealt. When one of the cultists asks Quinn to check on a man named Patrick O'Gorman and slides a not so small amount of money in his jacket, well, that's just the sort of hand Quinn has been looking for.

Thing is, Quinn soon finds out, O'Gorman disappeared under bizarre circumstances several years ago. For reasons he doesn't entirely understand, perhaps for the sake of having a purpose, Quinn begins a lurid quest to uncover the truth. What he finds out instead is that there are just as many crazies outside the walls of a cultist tower as there are inside.

Margaret Millar: How Like an Angel. Soho Press, ISBN: 9781681990163 (February, 2016), eBook, 0.68 MB (ca. 288 p.), $4.99.

Margaret Millar: How Like an Angel (USA 2000)

From the Publisher:
A taut classic thriller deviously contrived by americas critically acclaimed mistress of suspense
O'Gorman's dead. And private eye Joe Quinn is not convinced it was an accident in this crafty tale that takes the down-and-out detective from The Tower, a back-country compound housing a bizarre religious cult, to the backwater towns of southern California. Quinn may have thought a little religion wouldn't kill him when he stumbled upon the band of cultists in their secret quarters, but something else might, ill because the kindly eccentric Sister Blessing commissioned him to ferret out the whereabouts of the mysterious Patrick O'Gorman.

"In the whole of Crime Fiction's distinguished sisterhood there is no one quite like Margaret Millar." - Matthew Coady
"She writes minor classics." -- Washington Post

Margaret Millar, author of the Edgar Award-winning Beast in View, received the Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement by the Mystery Writers of America in 1983.

Margaret Millar: How Like an Angel. Carroll & Graf, ISBN: 0786707062 (February, 2000), 271 p., $5.95.

Margaret Millar: How Like an Angel (USA 1973)

From the Publisher:
BLESSED ARE THE LIVING
Martha O'Gorman's husband had walked out the door one rainy night five years ago and never come back. The police verdict was accidental death-but Patrick O'Gormans body was never found.

Now a stranger had come to town asking questions about Patrick's disappearance. He told Martha that Sister Blessing of the True Believers -- a strange, fanatical religious community in the California mountains -- had hired him to find Patrick. Martha resented the detective's questions and could see no connection between Sister Blessing and her missing husband. But there was a connection, and Martha would soon be forced to see it as she entered a dark, forbidding world of deception, horror, and death.

"SUSTAINED SUSPENSE... STUNNING!" -- Los Angeles Herald-Examine

Margaret Millar: How Like an Angel. A bizarre manhunt plunges a young widow into an ordeal of terror. New York: Avon, 1973, Avon Books #17699, 254 p., ¢95.

Margaret Millar: How Like an Angel (USA 1968)

From the Publisher:
MARGARET MILLAR
has never before told a story of such suspense-filled Intensity and scope; ranging from the mountains to the desert, from a millionaire's yacht to a cell in the state penitentiary... and into the darkest recesses of the human mind.

HOW LIKE AN ANGEL
"Each of her chilling tales formulates its own brand of suspense... a superior performance" -- Virginia Kirkus Review

Margaret Millar: How Like an Angel. New York: Dell, 1965, Dell Books #3870, Great Mystery Library, 256 p., ¢60.

Margaret Millar: How Like an Angel (USA 1962)

From the Publisher:
The request was an odd one,
and it came to Quinn from an unlikely source. Her name was Sister Blessing of the Salvation, and she belonged to a quasi-religious colony which had established itself in the California mountains, far from the world, the flesh, and the devil. Though money was forbidden in the colony, she paid Quinn one hundred and twenty dollars to find out if a man named Patrick O'Gorman was still living in the desert town of Chicote.

It turned out that O'Gorman had disappeared under mysterious circumstances five years before. As Quinn investigated these circumstances, he discovered that Sister Blessing and some of her fellow colonists were as deeply involved with the world and the flesh as the people of Chicote. He saw their lives disrupted by violent passions and ultimately by violent death.

As the intricate design of this novel emerges, it builds a pattern of mounting terror which reaches its climax on the last page. Mrs. Millar has never told a story of such sweep, ranging from the mountains to the desert, from a millionaire's yacht to a cell in the state penitentiary, and into the darkest recesses of the human mind. Beginning with Quinn himself, the young detective who has his own moral problems, the characters are depicted with wit and penetration. This is perhaps the most compelling novel that Margaret Millar has given us in the course of her continually surprising career.

MARGARET MILLAR is recognized here and abroad as one of the leaders in the renaissance of the mystery novel. Her books are marked by a deeply emotional commitment to life, balanced by an artist's concern with style and form. They constitute an original and disturbing series of novels -- HOW LIKE AN ANGEL is her eighteenth -- which are not only remarkable as mysteries, but rank with some of the best contemporary fiction.

Born in Canada in 1915, Mrs. Millar studied piano from the age of four until, as she says, she discovered that she wasn't good enough to become a concert pianist. She then majored in classics at the University of Toronto. She left school to get married, and after some wartime traveling now lives quietly in the Santa Barbara foothills. Her husband, also an author, writes his distinguished and popular mysteries under the name of Ross MacDonald. Mrs. Millar writes in longhand for three to four hours each morning, six days a week. Her hobbies are swimming, sailing, gardening and bird-watching.

In 1956 her novel, Beast in View, was given the Edgar Allan Poe Award by her fellow members of Mystery Writers of America, and the following year she was elected president of that organization. Her books have been widely translated in Europe, Asia and South America.

Margaret Millar: How Like an Angel. A compelling novel of suspense by the author of A Stranger in My Grave. New York: Random House, 1962, 278 p., $3.50.