"The brutal murder and attack on Andrew Jakes and his wife Angela" — that's how this story hooks you, about forty minutes in, and I remember pausing mid-step on the lakefront trail, Denise walking three paces ahead before she turned around and said, "You've got that face again." She knows the face. It's the one I make when a book grabs me by the collar and says, pay attention.
So let me be honest about what this book is and what it isn't.
Sheldon's Ghost, Bagshawe's Hands
Sidney Sheldon died in 2007. Tilly Bagshawe has been writing novels based on his unpublished notes ever since, and there's a question that hangs over every one of these posthumous collaborations: whose book is this, really? Angel of the Dark reads like Sheldon in the way a good cover band sounds like the original — you catch the riffs, the tempo, the crowd-pleasing hooks. The globe-trotting structure. The beautiful, dangerous women. The men who think they're smarter than they are. It's all there. But the spark? The thing that made Master of the Game or The Other Side of Midnight feel like they were running on some kind of narrative caffeine? That's harder to replicate from notes in an archive.
What Bagshawe does well is construct a proper mystery engine. LAPD detective Danny McGuire catches the Jakes case — a wealthy man murdered, his younger wife assaulted — and what starts as a Los Angeles crime story expands into something much wider. Mumbai. Europe. Multiple victims fitting the same pattern. The son's hunt for answers pulls you across continents, and the pacing works for about the first seven hours. The plot moves. Clues drop. You start building theories.
Then the last quarter happens.
I won't spoil it, but I will say this: there's a version of this story that ends two or three chapters earlier and is significantly better for it. The resolution overshoots. It explains too much, wraps too neatly, and by the time the final reveals land, I felt like the book was lecturing me on things I'd already figured out. My students do this in their essays — they don't trust the reader to get it, so they underline everything twice. Sheldon at his best trusted you. This ending doesn't.
Michael Kramer at 1.0x — The Mixed Blessing
Michael Kramer is a workhorse narrator, and I mean that with real respect. His Danny McGuire is solid — grounded, authoritative, a voice you'd follow into a case file. The male characters land with distinct enough weight that you always know who's talking.
But here's where it gets complicated. The female voices — and there are several important ones — tend to blur together. Angela Jakes, the other women connected to the pattern of murders, they all live in roughly the same vocal register with roughly the same breathiness. In a book where the women are supposed to be central to the mystery, that sameness works against the story. You need to feel the differences between these women to care about the pattern, and Kramer doesn't quite give you that.
His London accent is serviceable but occasionally slides. His Australian? Let's just say I've had students do better impressions in class readings of The Thorn Birds. (I'm kidding. Mostly.) These are minor complaints in an eleven-hour listen, but they're noticeable at 1.0x, where every vocal choice sits naked in front of you. The narrator understands that pause is punctuation — Kramer gets that right in the tense scenes — but the accent work needed another pass.
Who's Going to Love This, and Who Should Keep Walking
If you loved Sheldon's airport thrillers in the '80s and '90s, this scratches that itch. It does. The formula is intact: rich victims, international settings, a detective who won't quit, women who are more complicated than they first appear. It's entertainment-grade fiction, and there's nothing wrong with that. My students would probably eat this up faster than anything I assign them, which says something about both the book's accessibility and my curriculum.
But if you're coming in expecting Sheldon at his razor-sharpest — the plotting precision of If Tomorrow Comes, the sheer addictive pull of Master of the Game — you'll feel the gap. This is its spiritual successor in name and structure, but not quite in execution. The themes of justice and redemption are there, the psyche-fragility stuff that makes crime fiction interesting when it wants to be. But the prose doesn't quite earn the weight it's reaching for.
I listened to the last two hours while grading sophomore essays on To Kill a Mockingbird at 11 PM, and honestly? The book matched the energy. Competent. Sometimes better than competent. Occasionally frustrating. Worth pausing the faculty meeting for? The first half, absolutely. The ending? That's when I'd start paying attention to Principal Martinez's budget numbers.
The Red Pen Says
This is a B-minus audiobook. Good bones, solid narrator with specific blind spots, a plot that outruns its own ending. Sheldon completists will want it. Mystery fans who like their investigations served with champagne and passport stamps will enjoy the ride. Troubles in Paradise scratches a similar itch — sun-soaked settings, wealthy victims, secrets that keep multiplying — though it stumbles in its own ways in the home stretch. Just know that the destination is less satisfying than the journey, and Kramer's female voices needed more differentiation in a story that literally depends on distinguishing one dangerous woman from another.
