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SHADOW MEN
by Jonathon King
Orion, May 2004
259 pages
9.99GBP
ISBN: 0752861573


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Jonathon King was awarded an Edgar for his first attempt at fiction, THE BLUE EDGE OF MIDNIGHT. A journalist, King had already written his second book, A VISIBLE DARKNESS, when he garnered the award. Now cop-turned-PI, reclusive Max Freeman is once more drawn into crime in the Everglades.

King shares his preferred location, Florida, with Carl Hiaasen and Lawrence Shames. Unlike these two authors, he does not introduce a heavy dollop of humour. Instead, his book contains a good deal more that is dramatically dark.

The prologue to this story is harrowing. A man and his two teenage sons are attempting to escape the road gang building the Tamiami Trail, the road built through the swamp from Tampa to Miami. Eighty years in the past, the conditions were horrific with workers dying of malaria and attacks by alligators and, at times, something more sinister -- attacks from their own kind. The three members of the Mayes family are shot and killed.

In the present day, a descendant of the youngest Mayes son, who was too young to go with his father and brothers to work to support the family, presents the black lawyer friend of Max Freeman, Billy Manchester, with letters written by his ancestor. He wants desperately, for reasons of his own, to solve the mystery of why his great-grandfather apparently deserted his great-grandmother. Mark Mayes is inwardly driven to discover exactly what happened so long ago -- and why.

Max agrees to help the lawyer. He and Billy had been friends since their childhood when Billy's mother worked for Max's parents. The two boys shared the secret that Max's father, a decorated policeman, had been a wife basher, something which was, in those days, ignored by Freeman Senior's colleagues.

Now Max, a survivor from a relationship ruined by his profession of cop as well as a survivor of a near-fatal bullet wound incurred in the line of duty, is involved with a current law enforcement officer, Richards. She, too, is entangled in a conundrum of spousal abuse in that a professional colleague of hers is, she suspects, being assaulted by her policeman partner.

Max lives in an old research station on a river in the Everglades but not everyone is happy with his residence. Should it be destroyed, he would not be permitted to rebuild. To his horror, one morning he is awoken and is told someone has set part of his residence on fire.

Freeman uses his knowledge of one of the old characters living in the Everglades, Nate Brown, to hear the rumours surrounding the work that went into the road and just who was thought to be a killer at the time. Now he tracks down the great-grandson of that man and seeks to have the descendants of the men who took part in the long ago drama meet.

This is a simple and relatively uncomplicated story. There are sufficient dramas in the narrative to keep it moving although I felt the final surprise was, perhaps, not too well established but more thrown in to round out the story. Nonetheless, the situation is believable as are the characters and the dialogue realistic. All told, it is quite an enjoyable book.

Reviewed by Denise Pickles, July 2004

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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