How Like an Angel was published by Random House in 1962. Joe Quinn is a private detective who has gambled away his money and his car at a casino in Reno. Hitchhiking south through the California mountains, he is dropped at the gate of the Tower of Heaven — a religious community led by a woman called Mother Pureza. One of the community’s members, Sister Blessing, asks him to locate a man named Patrick O’Gorman, who she believes is alive somewhere in the town of Chicote below.
Quinn takes the case with no resources and no transportation, walking into Chicote and discovering that O’Gorman apparently died five years ago. But someone in the Tower of Heaven believes otherwise, and Quinn’s investigation pulls him into a tangle of old money, failed marriages, religious obsession, and the particular cruelties of small-town California.
Millar’s treatment of the Tower of Heaven is neither credulous nor contemptuous: the community is drawn with sympathetic precision, its members neither saints nor fools but damaged people seeking meaning in collective ritual and obedience. The novel’s mystery plot serves a larger investigation into the forms that faith takes in secular America — the desperation that drives people to surrender autonomy, and the exploitation that such surrender enables.
Collecting How Like an Angel
First edition (Random House, New York, 1962): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $100–$300
- Very good: $40–$100