by Alice Hoffman.

Shaye Arehart/Random House. 278 pages. $25.

By Beth Taylor
Special to the Journal

According to Alice Hoffman’s translation of ancient lore, there are three angels — the angel of death, the angel of life, and the angel who walks among us, helping when we do not know we need it and in ways we do not recognize until after the change has happened. Like us, this third angel also needs compassion.

In The Third Angel, Hoffman designs a layered and intertwined triptych around the stories of three women who, in different generations, are linked by blood, circumstance, and location as well as by visitations from each kind of angel. From section to section, the years peel back, from 1999, to 1967, to 1952. The common ground is the Lion Park Hotel near Kensington Gardens, London.

Hoffman is a master of the psychological narrative, the complicated women’s story. Of her 25 works of fiction, Here on Earth was an Oprah Book Club selection; Practical Magic and Aquamarine both became Hollywood movies. Many readers first came to know her heart-thrumming powers in Fortune’s Daughter. Now, true to form, Hoffman follows each woman as she flies close to the sun in her rebellious drive for what she believes is ideal love, gets scorched, and falls back to earth humbled and wiser.

Surprisingly, the novel gets off to an irritating start: In 1999 Maddy Heller, assertive New York lawyer and self-described misunderstood daughter, settles at the Lion Park Hotel to help with her sister Allie’s wedding to Paul. The glitch is that Maddy and Paul hooked up a few months back when Paul doubted his worthiness to marry someone as good as the self-martyring Allie. It’s impossible to warm up to any of these self-involved characters or to accept that we are supposed to feel some sympathy for their dysfunctional ways.

Luckily Hoffman seems to regain her footing in the next two sections, perhaps because their generations are closer to her own.

In 1966, rebellious but honest Frieda (who will become the mother of Paul in the first section) works as a live-in maid at the Lion Park Hotel. A college dropout, she falls for a heroin-addicted musician. Here Hoffman manages to ground the dysfunctions of drug abuse and the decadent side of ’60s London with enough believable detail and idealism to make the doomed relationship make sense in its era.

Then, in 1952 Lucy Green (who will become the mother of Maddy and Allie of the first section) is 12 years old. Mourning her mother’s early death, Lucy is drawn into the intrigue of a love triangle involving her stepmother’s sister, and is traumatized by its horrific conclusion. As her recovery plays out, Hoffman masterfully ties the themes of haunted legacy and regeneration back to the hopes and ghosts of the first section.

Ultimately, in her triangulations of the dark, light, and invisible, Hoffman once again weaves a tale that satisfies, allowing each generation to face its own version of dreams and mistakes, loss of faith and lurking angels, always finding some concrete way to come back to the universal need to “believe in something.” THE THIRD ANGEL,