A former Customs and Police Officer, Andrew Hill’s first book in a crime series set in the New Forest, where he lived for 30 years, will be published in Spring 2022. An avid reader across the crime genre and regular at crime writing festivals, he now lives in West Sussex and works in property.
It’s 1986 and Ben Wade a former LAPD officer has returned with his family to his home town, Rancho Santa Helena.
This quiet planned community is a world away from the gang-bangers of South Central Los Angeles, one of whom shot and wounded Ben some years earlier. The incident caused him to take stock of his life and that of his family, moving them to the supposedly safe suburbs, but it ultimately contributes to the breakup of his marriage.
Now a Detective with the local Police Department, Ben’s life is complicated by his ex-wife and his fourteen-year-old daughter, Emma.
This neighbourly sort of town has sought-after schools, a negligible crime rate and where folks can leave their windows and doors open with out a second thought. The downside of this suburban idyll is that it offers opportunity for a serial killer to slip within the gated communities under the cover of night.
The author explores the façade and the reality of a suburbia that has a gossamer thin border between a serene and untroubled life, and that of a town living in fear.
The author weaves into the narrative, a story of undocumented labour from across the southern border (without whom the local farmers couldn’t operate) and that of the labourer’s children, who today are termed ‘Dreamers.’
The first killing is swiftly followed by the discovery of a second body and the involvement of Natasha Betencourt, the local Medical Examiner and also Detective Wade’s friend.
As Ben starts to dig deeper into the killings and the ‘suicide’ of a local Hispanic athlete from the local High School, it leads him to a confrontation with both the killer, and a secret from the darkest corners of Ben’s past.
Shadow Man is a well-crafted and deceptively paced thriller, which deploys a dual narrative structure that both informs, as well drives the story onward; whilst vividly fleshing out the characters of both Wade and the killer.
A thoroughly enjoyable sophomore work from an author that makes the reader turn the pages adroitly and with increasing speed as the novel uncoils to a dark conclusion.
