Paul Adams hasn’t been home for 25 years. He had to come home, to help with his mother. Her care worker found her at the bottom of the stairs and called Paul to come to her in hospice. Paul hadn’t even known that his mother had a care worker, that she had been suffering from dementia. His mother had wanted to protect him, to keep him away from home, from the memories, from the danger. She protected him for 25 years, but now as he sits with his mother and she wakes sporadically, she tells him. “It’s in the house, Paul. In the house!”
Suddenly Paul is a teenager again, remembering everything that happened. The whole school year, from those first days of the term through to the murder. And while Billy was caught right after the murder an sent to prison, Charlie was never caught. He just disappeared, and he hadn’t been seen since.
DI Amanda Beck is struggling. It’s never easy to investigate the murder of a child, but when it’s ritualized, the killers caught still covered in blood, knives and dream journals in their hands, with red hand prints around the victim, she is at a loss. She turns to the one place where where she knows people will be talking about a crime like this—the internet. That’s where she discovers the origin of the myth that created this copycat murder, and where she first comes across the name Charlie Crabtree.
As Paul struggles to make peace with the past, he finds his anxiety rising. He hears noises in his mother’s house. He finds red hand prints in the attic. He finds a reminder from high school pushed through the letter box. Clearly, someone is trying to send him a message. Could it be Charlie, even after all that time, or is someone else trying to scare him?
And then there’s another murder, someone Paul used to know. DI Beck interviews him, trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together before others are killed, but will she be able to figure out what’s happened in time, or will the legend of Red Hands find himself yet another victim?
Alex North’s follow up to The Whisper Man is just as compelling and goose-bump-inducing as his first novel. The Shadows is another thrilling, chilling ghost story that takes what you think and turns it completely upside down, with twists that you can’t possibly see coming but that set your heart racing all over again.
For The Shadows, I listened to the audio book, narrated by John Heffernan and Hannah Arterton. Heffernan narrated most of the book, all the chapters that tell Paul’s story. I thought he did a beautiful job with hte pace and complexity of Paul’s journey. I could feel the character’s pain, his shame, his guilt as the pages went on, as the secrets were revealed, as the truths came to light. And Arterton embodied DI Beck as she searched for the answers she needed to put the case and her personal doubts to rest.
I devoured this book in days, reveling in the story, in the secrets, in the voices that transported me halfway across the world and back 25 years in time. If you are a fan of a scary story, North is a masterful writer. There is some violence towards teenagers, which is difficult to read (or listen to), but if you can stomach that, then The Shadows is one not to miss.
A copy of the audio book The Shadows was provided by Macmillan Audio through NetGalley, with many thanks.
