BOOK
Guardian Angel

Author: Stephanie Bedwell-Grime
Telos Publishing
RRP £9.99

ISBN 1 903889 62 6
Available now


Porsche Winter has a problem. As a fully fledged guardian angel, she is charged with the safety of her clients at all times. But you take your eye off the monitor for just one moment, and the Devil is in there with a demon snatching the soul from one of your clients. Now Alex Chalmers soul is lost to the Devil and Porsche soon realises that this is just a part of a plan for the Dark One to assert his authority over the Neverworld and to take control of Heaven. It doesn't help that Porsche too is the object of the Devil's lust. Porsche's day has started badly and is set to get even worse...

When Guardian Angel was plonked on my desk with a note asking me to review it I was uncertain whether it was going to be an interesting read or whether I was going to have to spend days painfully plowing through a book that didn't appeal to me. I didn't think much to the cover, but the blurb on the back sounded intriguing.

But when I turned to the first page and discovered it was written in the first person my heart sank. I know this is picky, and it is purely a personal thing, but I have always found novels written in this style very limiting. But, as soon as I started reading this book I couldn't put it down.

Stephanie Bedwell-Grime has a fantastically engaging writing style and she has a wicked sense of humour as well. I loved her whole notions of how Heaven and Hell were run - basically by civil servants. Stripped down to its bare bones there is very little story here - guardian angel looses a human's soul and then tries to get it back - but there is much more going on. Was Porsche negligent? Did someone frame her? And why is it that Satan is buying up shares in Heaven Inc?

It was halfway through this book that my mind came back to the cover. Despite my earlier feelings towards it, I actually realised that it perfectly reflected the contents - although I can see more than a few male readers lusting after a picture of Porsche in the attire that she wears for the last third of the book.

The end of the book also made me laugh out loud - something I haven't done while reading a novel for some years and for that alone Guardian Angel deserves bonus points.

I can only pray that the the real afterlife is something like that described by the twisted mind of Bedwell-Grime. A warm, funny and intelligently written look at what might be beyond the pearly gates. One of the funniest, yet at the same time rather touching, books I have read in a long time.

Amber Leigh

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