Arlen is an actress. A celebrity. A star. Albeit one who, seeing life irrevocably suffocated by fame, bails out, fleeing to the almost Bushido severity of her Austrian home, where one day she meets the enigmatic Leland Zivic. The war correspondent is the man she has been waiting for all her life, but is also a man with dire secrets that must eventually be shared.

There is a temptation to speculate that all this comes too easily to Carroll these days, and yet still a genuine excitement greets each new novel, consistently undercutting any feeling of constriction. His last, the ominous, forbiddingly grim After Silence, plumed the kind of depths even this writer had previously skirted, and if this new one never quite (thankfully?) plunges so deep again certainly it manages to celebrate morbidity with a fearless eye. Death is never far from anyone on these pages, not least Sophie's brother who - like a man met in a bar - is visited in sleep by Death. But Death magnanimously offers the chance to ask questions of him before the final visit. "Sometimes I come earlier than our appointment," he explains, "so people can get used to me." If he likes you then a relatively easy dispatch is assured. To Wyatt he appears as a Los Angeles cop.

From The Teeth of Angels, more so even than the other novels, is populated with Carroll's readily-transplanted travelling cast, among them Weber Gregston, the unfortunate film-maker (A Child Across The Sky, Bones of the Moon) is back with Walker Easterling and Maris York, principle players of the author's meisterwork, Sleeping in Flame. And more bizarrely, since he just happens to be long in the grave, Philip Strayhorne, Gregston's one-time director friend. But the overriding passion here is for the American's remarkably sustained casual magic; a startling magic realist's adroitness in believably fusing the everyday and the metaphysical with instinctive ease.

The suspicion, after some nine novels now of this highly-coloured and flexible world, is one of a writer accelerating towards something, a single focus, and certainly the dying pages of this book more than ever expose a greater universal truth in this fiction. Although that said, it is far from obvious where this is leading; when a character asks, "Can you show us God?" Carroll hardly reaches a hand out for his Bible. This God is as much in the terrible details of cancer, AIDS and the war in the former Yugoslavia as it is in the extraordinary surrealist images of the climax. For that, Jonathan Carroll is unique, and that is really all you need to know.