Nine years ago, a giant spaceship shaped like a gleaming silver city crash-landed at the edge of Los Angeles. When the ten thousand occupants emerged, they didn’t look like the aliens we expected—they looked like angels, winged humans straight from myth and religion.

The ship did not land intact; engines destroyed, resources depleted, the once glorious city of the Angels has become a towering husk, its silhouette slicing into the Los Angeles skyline where Santa Monica once lay.

In the years since their arrival, the Malaki’i refugees—nicknamed “Angels”—have had to integrate into life in Los Angeles, amidst a wide range of reactions. Some see the Angels as alien invaders. Some see them as proof of God. Some of them see them as job-stealing immigrants. This abrupt cultural clash has transformed the Silver City into a cross between an urban ghetto and a Native American Reservation. The Angels, a proud warrior race, often remain isolated and aloof, preferring to live life high in the silver spires—the only place they’re allowed to fly freely due to FAA regulations.

To help combat the rise of crime in this mix of cultures, the LAPD has formed a Joint Task Force with the Malaki’i military guard, known as The Sword.

Alejandra “Alex” Martinez, is a fourteen-year-old human girl who has been living in the silver spires since the age of six. Her mother, Marielena Martinez, is a police officer who operates on the human/angel joint task force—partnered with a warrior Angel called Pyr’ell. Understanding the need for coexistence and tolerance, Marielena voluntarily moved her daughter to the Silver City as part of a cultural exchange program—which has forced Alex into a role of permanent outsider: she’s perfectly at ease at the great heights of the Spires, but she’s shunned by the Angels, who see her as a tiny, flightless bird.

The worst part of Alex’s day is when she has to descend to the surface to attend Paradise High, an integrated high school of human and Angel adolescents. Rife with self-imposed segregation, the proud Angels perch at the tops of fences and basketball hoops, while the human kids hang out in small corridors where the Angels can’t fit.

Alex is at home with neither the Angels nor the humans, but it is this unique experience that allows her to traverse the rising tensions between the two worlds. When a human teenager dies while high on an Angel drug called Ambrosia,  the already tense relations between Angels and humans erupt into chaos. It is only Alex, the flightless girl who walks the spires, who can solve the mystery of the Angel drug trade and the buried secret that reaches from the peak of the Spiral Court to the deep recesses of Old Santa Monica.

LOST ANGELS is an immigrant tale, a mystery spun from the alien towers of a sci-fi culture clash, and the coming-of-age of a girl caught between two very different worlds.