Angelology has an interesting premise: Against God’s wishes, angels (called Watchers)  sent to Earth to watch over humans mated with human girls. Their hybrid children—called Nephilim—still live among us, an evil race which must be destroyed. Since its foundation a thousand years ago, the secret society of the Angelologists has been trying to do so.

As the book begins, we meet a young nun named Evangeline whose orderly life in a monastery in upstate New York is about to be disturbed. She meets a man who is searching for some letters he thinks Mrs. Rockefeller sent to the previous Mother Superior. Although he doesn't know it, his employer is a Nephilim who believes these letters hold the clue to the location of the lyre, a mythical instrument of angelic origin.

Evangeline's search for these letters brings her to an old nun who becomes the narrator of the second part of the book. Here we learn how, as an Angelology student in 1939 Paris, she met Evangeline's grandmother and later became part of the expedition that found and retrieved the lyre from the depths of the cave where the Watchers are still imprisoned for their disobedience.

The lyre has been hidden since then. The search for it constitutes the third part of the book, a decaffeinated, adrenaline-lacking puzzle-solving story a la The Da Vinci Code.

The Nephilim wants the lyre because he believes its music can cure him of a mysterious ailment that is destroying his wings and killing him. Why the Angelologists want to find the lyre is never made clear. In fact, by the end of the book, they are still arguing over whether they should hide it again or destroy it. Given the fact that it is so well hidden that neither they, nor the Nephilim, have been able to find it for over fifty years, and that they are been followed by the Nephilim as they investigate its location, why would they want to uncover it?

This is only one of the many holes in the plot that made this book such a frustrating read for me. The fact that the characters are underdeveloped, and the writing is poor didn't help either.

Overall, there is a lot of telling but not enough showing. For instance we are told the Nephilim are evil and responsible for all things evil, like the ascent of the Nazis and Darwin's theory of Evolution (seriously), and we are told the Angelology society is good. But whether this is true is not clear to me. In fact it seems to me (especially after one of the last events, which I won't disclose, as it would spoil the ending) that their methods are not so different. And, if we behave like the enemy in order to defeat him, don't we become him? Or is it that what the author is actually saying?

Despite its flaws, Angelology did keep me guessing what was coming next, especially in the middle section that covers the events in 1939 Paris and the expedition to the cave.