Even though Dead and Dying Angels (Libro Uno of The Dos Cruces Trilogy) was optioned for film first, The Vinegaroon Murders (Libro Dos of The Dos Cruces Trilogy), my second novel, is just a bit closer to my heart.

Writers' League of Texas — Violet Crown Award for Best Work of Fiction

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There is a criminal investigation in James A. Mangum's The Vinegaroon Murders (John M. Hardy Publishing, 240 pp. $19.95), but the mystery that dominates the novel is the human condition. Narrated by a digressive, hyped-up Seraph (the lowest tier, we are given to understand, of angeldom) who has charge of the appealingly tormented and depressed Jamey Maxwell, the book overlays the emptiness of West Texas with a mordant, loopy, fateful reality that somehow stirs together Milton, Gnosticism and Hispano-Catholic lore with a sardonic, even affectionate commentary on the ineluctable insanity of human life.

Ever surprising, with a hard-edged contemporaneity (the Seraph loves and liberally uses the "f" word), this second book in Mangum's trilogy is a comic revelation. Trailing the guilt and ghosts of his dead wife and daughters, as well as other deaths on his conscience, Jamey undertakes to find the killers of an altogether nice couple found shotgunned in the desert and covered with the scorpions called vinegaroons.

This involves perusing the San Antonio high society of which the couple was a part, where he meets Janette, a psychiatrist-in-distress. But clues and evidence are less propulsive here than Jamey's own ragged unconsciousness, sporadically salted with messages from God and visions from the Book of Enoch.

Vengeance, cave paintings, smiling dogs and human despair inhabit the whirlwind of this original novel, which convincingly evokes a world bent to the arcane needs of God and his watchful minions.

-Houston Chronicle

 

"Daring...riveting...scary...beautiful"

– Eric Snider, Weekly Planet (Tampa) 

 

"Quirky doesn’t even begin to describe THE VINEGAROON MURDERS, the dust-blown supernatural murder mystery that makes up volume two of JAMES A. MANGUM’s Dos Cruces trilogy. For starters, the narrator is an angel, though decidedly not the stuff of Sunday school: Shyanne, a seraph, drops the F-bomb with alarming frequency and takes human form (the comely shape of German supermodel Claudia Schiffer, to be precise) to get a bartending gig.  And then there’s Jamey Maxwell, the retired customs agent pursuing the killers who hears the voice of God in his head. ...you’ve got to admire a cynic capable of imagining guardian angels as being like 'every monster under the bed . . . rolled into one and on steroids, acid, and crack cocaine.'"

– Texas Monthly

 

"Author Jim Mangum is once again keeping us on our toes as we try to tease out the levels of reality, sanity, and madness in a Texas completely contemporary and original. In this unexpected thriller, we will be schooled in the finer points of Judeo-Christian history in ways The Da Vinci Code never contemplated...and it's not what you think. It's a funhouse ride."– Bruce Gilbert (Academy Award-winning producer of On Golden Pond, The China Syndrome, and 9 to 5)