Shadow Man

April 24, 2017
Set in Southern California in the mid-1980s, Drew’s entertaining, well-constructed second novel (after Gardens of Water) subverts action hero tropes. Ben Wade, a former big-city cop, moved back to his small hometown of Santa Elena to try to save his marriage after being shot on the job. Although that didn’t work out, he and his ex both still live there, taking care of their teen daughter, Emma. His quiet life is disrupted when a serial killer makes his way to Santa Elena and strangles a local woman. Around the same time, a local teen, an undocumented immigrant, kills himself, and Wade’s investigation into the latter stirs up some of his own memories. He’s joined in his investigations by medical examiner Natasha Betencourt; a potential romance between them seems to have stalled. As they dive deeper into both cases, Wade and Betencourt are forced to start looking into Wade’s own past as well. The darkness that affects Wade, a lone wolf who rides horses for pleasure, forms the heart of the story, and Drew draws it out nicely while still moving the plot forward. Agent: Dorian Karchmar, WME Entertainment.

Starred review from April 15, 2017
Ben Wade, a former LAPD detective now working homicide in the southern Orange County town of Rancho Santa Elena, is forced to confront his own dark past in investigating a series of killings.Four years ago, Ben moved back to Santa Elena, the town in which he grew up, to escape the stresses of the urban beat. Followed by his demons, he was unable to save his marriage, and he's pained to watch developers transform his bucolic hometown: "It was like watching a virus consume the soft tissue of land." Now, Santa Elena is also threatened by a serial killer preying on women who don't worry about locking their doors or windows. And when a teenage Mexican boy--a "Juan Nadie," or John Doe--turns up dead in a field, a bullet in his head and a gun in his hand, it's apparent that a second killer is on the loose. After the teen is identified as a member of the high school swim team, on which Ben was once a star, the detective must revisit his painful adolescence to track down the person responsible for the kid's staged suicide while negotiating the unhappy present to nab the mass murderer. At first, the plot elements seem overly familiar: another flawed cop pining for his ex-wife, another psychopath revealing himself in italicized sections, another police chief putting expediency before justice. But the deeper you get into the mystery, Drew's first, the more its rendering of this particular time and place--and the history and social factors that define it, a la Chinatown--draws you in. And the more you learn about Ben and his troubled upbringing, the more courageous the novel seems in exposing truths that most crime fiction doesn't go near. Ben's relationship with a female medical examiner who sees through his defenses is powerfully affecting. An unusually deft blending of styles, Drew's engrossing novel works equally well as psychological study and cop thriller, literary novel and genre piece.

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Starred review from March 15, 2017
Drew's debut psychological thriller succeeds admirably. There are three hearts of human darkness within, and it is for the reader to decide which character is the true shadow man. Detective Ben Wade quit the LAPD and returned to his California hometown of Rancho Santa Elena in the hope of mending his marriage. It didn't quite work out. The shadows from his past won't allow it. The novel is set against the massive basin development boom of the 1980s, and the sounds of bulldozers mingle with some truly awful '80s rock lyrics. Migrant workers toil endlessly and take shelter in their cardboard housing just beyond the well-trimmed borders of new condominium complexes and golf courses. The town suddenly finds itself at the mercy of the Night Prowler, a serial killer who slips quietly through windows and screen doors, murdering with astonishing regularity. His shadows come from a merciless boyhood right out of Dave Pelzer's A Child Called It (1995). When a teenage migrant worker is found dead, Ben spins out of control, but he remains a likable character, mainly due to the author's sensitive narrative, which remains steady as the tension escalates. The Steinbeck-like passages about the vanishing cowboy landscape contribute to the novel's power. Recommend this one to fans of Michael Connolly, Tana French, and Dennis Lehane, who treat young victims and troubled investigators with the same sensitivity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)