We Chase Shadows is a sequel-machine mystery that turns murder, trauma, organized crime, loneliness, marriage, grief, revenge, and global counterfeit-pharmaceutical rackets into one long string of quips. It wants to be charming, fast, warm, clever, international, and emotionally generous. Mostly, it is a baggy comic thriller that is so busy being pleased with its own jokes that the murders barely matter.
The book opens in Málaga in 2001 with Connor Brooks, a British criminal hiding out in Spain. He thinks the police are closing in, hears dogs, suspects someone has betrayed him, and prepares “Plan B”: disappear before the authorities arrive. At first, this looks like the origin story of a fugitive who will become the terrifying Jakob Eriksson, the supposed Swedish criminal mastermind haunting the rest of the novel. The opening voice is broad, laddish, paranoid, jokey, and already exhausting. Connor talks like a stand-up routine in a pub: prison jokes, bad nicknames, wigs, dodgy vitamins, fake bravado. It sets up danger, but it also sets up the book’s biggest weakness: nothing can be allowed to be frightening for more than two sentences before a gag arrives to deflate it.
In the present, Steve Wheeler is still in Axley, still grieving Debbie, still eating and chatting with the same pub regulars, still somehow both ex-copper and village innocent. Rosie D’Antonio is launching another thriller, And the Devil Blinked First, while Amy Wheeler hovers at the book party feeling socially lost among literary people. Rosie goes on The Graham Norton Show, flirts with Denzel Washington, promotes her book, and advertises the detective agency: “We Solve Murders.” It is all extremely self-aware, and also extremely easy. Celebrity culture, publishing publicity, Graham Norton, private jets, free champagne, book-launch awkwardness: the novel keeps turning every environment into a sketch.
