Shadow Man

Alan Drew Press Reviews

Wonderfully imagined and wonderfully written, patient but propulsive, serious but suspenseful, grown-up but gripping, Shadow Man is everything a great thriller should be. * Lee Child *

Shadow Man is smart, chilling, and impossible to put down, an accomplished thriller by a writer to watch. Alan Drew is a rising star, blending suspense and humanity with consummate style. -- William Landay * Author of Defending Jacob *

Shadow Man revises the old detective story and turns it in several fascinating directions. Alan Drew writes with precision, subtlety, and a streak of suspense that does not often color the literary novel. * Colum McCann *

Part murder mystery, part family drama, Alan Drew's Shadow Man has everything I like in a novel: grit, heart, and nail-biting suspense. It's the sort of magically absorbing novel that keeps you turning the pages and checking the locks on the door. -- Lauren Grodstein * author of A Friend of the Family *

Excellent, atmospheric . . . [a] superb police procedural . . . [Ben Wade] is but one of many sharply etched characters who help make Shadow Man a stellar achievement, a book that unspools like a dark-toned movie in the reader's mind. * The Wall Street Journal *

In Alan Drew's electric new novel, Southern California in the 1980s is so palpable it is almost a character of its own, lucid and relevant. His main character, Detective Ben Wade, is an outsize but knowable force, up there with Marlowe and Jake Gittes. Shadow Man is an enrapturing read from its start to its unpredictable, enthralling finish. -- Daniel Torday * Author of The Last Flight of Poxl West *

Always thrilling and often terrifying, Shadow Man is a descendent of Chandler's The Big Sleep. Underlying the grisly dangers of Drew's novel is the forceful honesty of all good California noir, the necessary and clear-eyed exploration of the innate human truths that should and do scare us. * Claire Vaye Watkins *