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When the weather starts to warm up, I always crave a real page turner to read outside. Unfortunately Alan Drew’s new release, “Shadow Man,” didn’t fit the bill.
“Shadow Man” is the story of a detective, Ben Wade, who recently returned to his quiet hometown in Southern California in order to repair his marriage. When the story opens, he and his wife, Rachel (also his high school sweetheart) are divorced, sharing time with their teenage daughter, Emma.
It’s also the story of a peaceful community shaken to the core by a serial killer, who breaks into homes of people living alone and kills them. Ben pairs up with with Natasha Betencourt, another high school friend, who now works as a medical examiner to help solve the crimes.
All isn’t what it seems in Rancho Santa Elena, even before the killer struck. Ben has a dark past, which he has never spoken about. Experiences from his high school years have made him the man he is today and caused him to close himself off from people, including his former wife and Natasha, who has romantic feelings for him.
Being back home means he is unable to avoid that part of his life. When a teenage boy is discovered dead, he is left wondering if the serial killer took another victim or if the death was caused by the same darkness in his own past.
Ben is forced to confront events from his high school years for the first time, in order to prevent another student facing the same trauma he did. At the same time, he is trying to focus on tracking down the serial killer.
Chapters from the serial killer’s perspective are woven through the book as well. While we never entirely know his past in all of its terrible details, there is enough information to understand why he became the person he is.
The book takes place in the 1980s, which is a small detail that could be missed by readers initially, but which explains the lack of things taken for granted today like cell phones. I’m not from California, but many people who are familiar with this region raved about how well Alan Drew depicted the area.
My complaint is that this felt like two very different stories. The serial killer storyline was interesting, but that part of the plot was never given the urgency that leads to a real page-turner. Most of the book was focused on Ben’s lingering trauma.
Were those two parts of the story connected? Yes, but by too thin of a thread. Rather than label this a thriller, I would consider it more of a psychological character study with a murderer thrown in to give the detective something to work on while sorting through his past. The trouble, I suppose, lies in how this is marketed.
“Shadow Man” is well written and Ben is an interesting character, although very much the archetypal noir detective. However, it wasn’t the book I had been hoping to read, which was disappointing.
