THE THIRD ANGEL.
Alice Hoffman. Shaye Areheart. 288 pages. $25 .
Alice Hoffman has given love a bad name in more than a few of her novels, and she has done it again, skillfully and smartly, in The Third Angel. Characters reel from love, lust and misdirected devotion, and the consequences are dire. Against this dark backdrop, though, comes wisdom borne from love gone wrong.
The three interrelated stories connect in this spellbinding novel, set at a London hotel haunted by the ghost of a man who lost at love. It opens with the story of two sisters in 1999. Maddy, meeting Allie's fiancé Paul for the first time, experiences an intense attraction; ''it had a life of its own.'' Paul has tried to prove to Allie all along that he's not right for her, so sleeping with her sister seems a good idea. But he's dying, and that's when Allie, who secretly had her own doubts, really falls in love with him.
Paul's mother Frieda tells Allie, ``To love someone so complicated you had to be committed to a single emotion -- the way you loved him -- no matter what. In that way, [love] was indeed simple.''
Frieda also tells Allie about the Third Angel, the story's unifying theme. Frieda's physician father swore to the existence on Earth of the Angel of Life and the Angel of Death, but also a Third Angel. ``[H]e's the most curious. You can't even tell if he's an angel or not. You think you're doing him a kindness, you think you're the one taking care of him, while all the while, he's the one who's saving your life.''
Frieda is the focus of Hoffman's next section, set 33 years earlier. She leaves home to work at the London hotel as a maid, primarily to defy her father. She falls for an aspiring rock star, a junkie engaged to a wealthy Londoner. He claims Frieda is his muse, but it's not hard to see where this story is going. Still, the Third Angel manifests itself in this disastrous affair as well.
The final story, set in 1952, is about Allie and Maddie's mother, Lucy, when she was a girl staying at the London hotel for a wedding. Still mourning her mother's death, Lucy doesn't care much about anything except the The Diary of Anne Frank. ''Unlike Anne Frank, I do not still have faith in people,'' she says, yet she becomes caught up in a love triangle and unwittingly plays the part of the Third Angel herself.
Hoffman's exploration of the dark side of love is mysterious and as suspenseful as a good thriller, but her talent for creating meaningful characters grounds the book in a healthy and appealing realism. With their human frailties and respective growth and redemptions, Allie, Frieda and Lucy are recognizable, and that's what makes this novel succeed.
Amy Canfield is a freelance writer in Portland, Maine.
