Shadow Season

A tragically blinded former cop from New York City is transplanted to a private girl's high school upstate. Here he's an English lit teacher with a troubled past and an attraction to the students. This is a wonderful murder mystery, but this production is a disappointment. Elijah Alexander's narrator voice is terrific; however, he tries too hard with the dialogue. Murphy's Irish brogue is awful, and the black cook sometimes sounds ghetto and sometimes Jewish! The inconsistency of the voicings makes identifying the characters difficult. A high point is Alexander's pacing, which enhances the tension of the story. M.C. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine

Starred review from September 7, 2009
In Piccirilli's brooding, character-driven chiller, former New York City cop Finn, recently blinded, wallows in his new role as an English teacher at a posh girls' boarding school. A storm looms as Finn and a skeleton staff remain to supervise a handful of girls staying at the school during winter break. Piccirilli (The Fever Kill
) harps on his theme of isolation with palpable glee as Finn, surrounded by self-absorbed adolescents and mysterious, brutally violent attackers roaming the campus, grapples with blindness amid a sonar-dulling snowstorm in a remote area with no cellphone service. Terrified of solitude and driven by his cop instincts, Finn embarks on a wrenching journey that exposes the raw emotion of a man nearly destroyed by disability and circumstance.