Sunday, April 27, 2025

The Shadows We Hide by Allen Eskens

 

This is not a great novel, not a particularly great crime/thriller novel, but it's not horrible, either. Even though the structure is kinda looping and non-linear, it's not very complex or complicated--there are some twists that border on rugpulls, that'd probably play better in some visual medium than they do on the page, especially with a first-person narrator who's clearly making an explicit choice about what to tell, and clearly stringing on along the reader in a way that makes little to no diagetic sense; but the narrative does manage to carry on past those, and things to clear up, and those twists end up revealing about as much about the narrator as they do about the mystery he's found himself in the middle of. There are some thematic concerns floating along, mostly about people not being lost causes, but they very much mostly serve the story rather than the other way around. The first half or a little more is a bit of a haul, but the back end is a nice resolution. I might grab something else by this guy at some point, which I guess means it might be better than "not horrible."

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