Reviews

Listened to the audiobook, which makes a story always even better than reading it for yourself. As always when Kale Williams is narrating.

The plot is good. On the on hand there is a mystery with murdered male prostitutes and a psychic and cop team hot on the trail of the murdered. On the other we have a grieving character who is trying to slowly move on from grieving and to possible romance. I thought that part was well done. Liam and Kimball slowly see each other in a new life, though Detective Thompson remains a bit of mystery.

I did thought the story overall was a bit thin. It's very character driven, focussed solely on Liam and Kimball. There is hardly to no interaction with other characters. Not Thomposon's fellow cops nor mention of friends on Liam's side. That made it that the story was not very rounded. I hope the world building will grow in the following books in the series.

the_novel_approach's review

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5.0

~ 4.5 Stars ~

In the ongoing saga of Where Has This Book Been All My Life?, S.C. Wynne’s Shadow’s Edge takes its place among those rare little gems that remind me why I love to read.

Liam Baker has a talent, or a curse, depending upon which side of it you’re on. He can communicate with the dead, which proves helpful to the LAPD homicide division but doesn’t do much for Liam’s nerves on top of the fact that his own existence over the past nine months has been more one foot in the abyss than an active participation in living. Wynne draws readers into Liam’s life by allowing him to narrate this story in the first person, which is so effective in the result of this drawing an immediate emotional connection between us and the single most traumatic event of his life. Connecting with his pain allows us to build on that investment in a way that makes rooting for some sort of happiness to fall into his orbit part of the engagement in the story

Homicide detective Kimball Thompson has known Liam for a while, but their working relationship is a recent development precipitated by a string of murders with similarities that include puzzling clues left at the crime scenes. Someone is killing street kids, but, more specifically, he’s killing the boys who trade sex for cash, which seems to be the only common connection apart from the items left on or near their bodies. Wynne does a fantastic job of meting out the details of the crimes without giving away everything all at once, including the way Liam’s abilities help but are also hampered by this investigation in a metaphysical way, and I loved trying to piece together the clues along with Liam and Thompson. The best aspect of the procedural is it develops in a way that just as they were figuring out what it all meant, so did I, and those participation points I allowed myself made the reading all the more satisfying.

The gradual and natural evolution of Liam and Thompson’s relationship happens amidst a confusion of feelings for Liam and translates into his nearly losing his one shot at reengaging in his life again. Simply put, Thompson was on the verge of giving up on ever getting closer to Liam, of drawing him back from that abyss and making him see that having a future didn’t mean losing all that mattered to him in the past, and I liked that the tension was drawn out without it eclipsing the fact that there was still a serial killer on the loose.

In a scant 169 pages, S.C. Wynne tells an outstanding story with a proficient economy. The investigation could have been drawn out, the tension between Liam and Thompson could have been exaggerated and left to flounder along interminably, but none of that was necessary to tell an effective story. Once Liam and Thompson put the meaning of the clues together, things wrapped up quickly with a thrilling brush with the killer that exposed his pathology and psychopathy in a delicious way.

Suspenseful on both the investigative and romantic fronts, Shadow’s Edge is one of the finest books I’ve read so far this year.

Reviewed by Lisa for The Novel Approach

isalaur's review

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fast-paced

3.5

3.5 stars…I enjoyed the premise but the book seems out of balance and I didn’t really feel like I got to know the MCs that well. As an example, how come Detective Thompson has no first name? The entire time he is only referred to as Thompson and Liam only calls him Thompson. That’s weird.

As the book starts I felt like I came into the middle of something. I never enjoy when that happens. Details to fill in some blanks were gradually revealed but not in enough detail or a time,y enough manner for it not to be unsettling. We spend the whole book chasing this killer who somehow has the ability to psychically block Liam but we never get told how or why or why not at first. We nothing about the killer at all which is also just bizarre. Now it know from reading the blurbs of the subsequent books that it’s not the last we’ll see of him but still, the book feels like it just abruptly ended…like someone pulled the plug.

While I get that this is an ongoing series I still like a book to have a finished feel to it. This one does not. If I were reading it when it had first been written and I couldn’t immediately check out book two I would have been too irritated to continue with the series. But since I can I will check out book two and see if I can get better invested in the characters because I do like the premise.