Dancing on the Head of a Pin - Thomas E. Sniegoski

I read the first of this series “A Kiss Before The Apocalypse” back in 2011. I loved the graphic novel feel of the plot: Remy Chandler, a Seraphim who walked away from Heaven after the war between the angels, has lived for millennia on Earth in human form but has only recently found and married the love of life, now has to risk everything to save the world from the apocalypse. It doesn’t get better than that. Except, actually, it does because he has a labrador called Marlowe that he can communicate with.

 

At the end of the book, my only regret was that I didn’t know more about Remy’s backstory with his wife and that the cover art was appalling.

 

I came back to the series this year, with “Dancing On The Head Of A Pin”, this time in audiobook format.

 

The good news is: there’s a lot of back story on Remy’s relationship with his wife, his dog and his best human friend and it’s all well written (although very sad) and Nick Daniels does a great job of the narration.

 

The bad news is that the cover art is still awful.

 

This book retains the graphic novel feel and mostly does very well with it. The violence is graphic and frequent from the almost the first page onwards. If this was a graphic novel, there would be blood and gore and body-parts everywhere. I thought some of the fight scenes went on for too long and the angel on angel confrontations were hard to get engaged with.

 

I loved the parts with Marlowe and also with the Rottweilers guarding one of the buildings Remy visits.

 

I enjoyed the book enough to look for the next in the series. Then I found that none of the series are available in audiobook format in Europe anymore – including “Dancing On The Head Of A Pin”. This mirrors what’s happened with the Kitty Norville books. I can only get them in Europe as CDs. This is beginning to annoy me.

 

What is audible.com up to? It’s time they joined the twenty-first century and found a way around nineteenth century copyright agreements. If that means paying a premium the way I used to on imported books and records in the last century, I could put up with the for a while, but Amazon have made audible the fastest growing audiobook platform in the world, so I don’t understand why they aren’t taking a more global view.