The Empty Ones

Two timelines run side by side. In the earlier one, Carey and Randall leave New York for London, hunting the people who took Gus. Along the way they keep running into hollowed-out creatures that wear human faces, and the number of them keeps growing.

In the present day, Kaitlyn is trying to understand what she has become since her first encounter with an angel. She also needs to learn what that change lets her do against these creatures, and how far she can push it.

Help reaches both threads from a direction neither group would have chosen. As it arrives, the true nature of the angels begins to come into focus, and the picture is not a reassuring one for anyone involved.

This is the second book of The Vicious Circuit, placed between The Unnoticeables and Kill All Angels. The trilogy is punk-rock horror, and this volume keeps the alternating timelines of the first, with a joke on nearly every page.

The comfort available to the characters shrinks steadily in both threads. Carey and Randall have a friend to find, Kaitlyn has a new and unfamiliar power to understand, and each answer they turn up leaves them with less to lean on.