Wonders Never Cease Book

Welcome to Los Angeles, the city of angels, where traffic never stops, people never sleep, and wonders never cease. It's a brilliant plan, if Kemp McAvoy says so himself--and Kemp never hesitates to point out his own brilliance. Kemp is a night nurse for a beautiful but aging movie star in a medically induced coma. And with the help of her agent and a struggling young publisher, he's concocted a can't-fail scheme that will make them all rich. Olivia Hayden is about to receive a heavenly visitor--an angel with a message for all humankind. All it takes is a blinding light and a little adjustment of her meds, and when she awakes she'll think it was real--and they'll have an instant best-selling book. The scheme seems foolproof. All they have to do for it to work is be good angels and stay out of trouble. But Kemp McAvoy has never been good at staying out of trouble--and he doesn't realize there may be out-of-this-world consequences for impersonating an angel. From award-winning...

Publishers Weekly

Christy Award-winning author Downs (Plague Maker) delivers a novel different in tone from his previous suspense thrillers. When famed actress Olivia Hayden ends up in intensive care after a car accident, her nurse, Kemp McAvoy, seizes the opportunity to exploit the comatose star for his own personal gain. But while he's playing “angel” to the infirm celebrity, his girlfriend's daughter, Leah Pelton, claims she truly does see divine spirits. As the novel intensifies, the manipulation of one manufactured mystery becomes mired in criminal missteps; meanwhile, the other, possibly hallucinatory one, proves more difficult to refute. While Downs attempts to maintain the edge of a crime novel in this energetic drama, McAvoy's loutish nature, foiled by Pelton's endearing sincerity, makes for overly simplified characters in a sometimes stilted narrative. Nevertheless, fans of his previous books may find it refreshing to read this author's fast-paced novel set not in the South but in the greedy world of Hollywood. (May)