The Shadows by Alex North

 

Based on everything on the cover--art, blurbs, jacket-flap summary--this novel looks for all the world like a Horror novel, and it sorta kinda plays at being one, sometimes. It's not. It's a novel about crime, and there's a little tension in it, and a twist or three (mostly crap, just total rugpulls with no textual clues) but it mostly just kinda trundles along. The big weirdness I noticed is that though the voice is clearly and distinctly Brit--especially in some moments of dialogue--this version/edition at least is typeset so as to be more familiar to Americans (spelling and punctuation); what's weird is that there's nothing about any of the places in it to put it anywhere, either American or English--there's nothing remarkable enough about the setting to keep it from being wherever the reader imagines it to be. Which kinda goes with the rest of the novel, really, there's not much distinctive about the characters or anything else in the story.