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Looping? A local? And what of us born of light and not of flesh? Steele (Angel City, 2013, etc.) wraps up his Swiss missive with a suitably apocalyptic bye-bye. Come the end of time, we'll all be speaking in Shatner-esque sentence fragments. Lots. Of 'em. And worse: "In a dark, silent room. Naked on a concrete floor. His wrists bound together in front of him; no idea where he was or how he got here." The reader will have an idea, of course: it's what happens when Satan's minions start messing about in the tidy confines of Lausanne. There, as patient readers of the Angelus Trilogy will recall, young Katherine Taylor once did a thriving trade as a, ahem, naughty person of the evening. Until, that is, she fell in with steely-jawed detective Jay Harper, whose brief includes fighting the forces of darkness, shadowy types that are now threatening Katherine and her young son, Max (and what kind of demigodly moniker is Max, anyway?). Katherine knows that, sins and all, she's "just an ordinary human being," but that doesn't keep her from taking odd trips along the space-time continuum. That's looping for you, which is just another way of rebooting reality, the better to keep track of what the bad guys are doing. Say what? Well, if you were an angel or a half-kind, you'd understandand there's plenty of bad-guy activity to monitor as the story settles in on the beleaguered Middle East, where radical Zionists and black-hat Arabs are working hard to do each other in. Who's the bad guy? "Both," says a dishy Israeli intelligence agent. "That is the tragedy of it." Grantedbut only one side has Zoroaster's sextant. And thus the plot thickens. Never mind the logical improbabilities: it's a Dan Brown knockoff, to be sure, but Steele's story has its escapist virtues. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.