Criminology academic Kate Marshall is on a scuba jaunt with her son when they dive toward a shocking discovery: the body of a teenage boy entangled below the surface of the Shadow Sands reservoir. The detective chief inspector’s too-quick narrative of a tragic drowning doesn’t add up, and when Kate follows the evidence, it leads to a darker discovery.
The victim is only the latest in a series of mysterious deaths and disappearances linked to the moorlands—and a mythic phantom said to hide in the rolling fog. When a researcher of urban legends vanishes without a trace, Kate and her associate Tristan Harper must act fast and look deep if they hope to find her alive.
But the elusive serial killer they’re hunting isn’t the only one a step ahead of Kate and Tristan. Someone else is making dead certain that the secrets of Shadow Sands stay buried.
Shadow Sands is the second Kate Marshall book, following the amazing Nine Elms.
Yes. Read that one first. I really shouldn't have to tell you all the time.
I actually had another post all ready for today. It was a book that started strong and then crashed and burned and was really rather not that great about 14 pages AFTER 56. I just didn't feel right about posting two really strong teasers for a book that went wheeeee-boom. SO I grabbed my next Bryndza and got a couple of chapters in before having to do the joyous overnight at work. It should have been fine. It's a freaking holiday so that typically means deadville in the hotel world.
Nope.
However, the problematic dipwads that I had to deal with for the first three hours of my shift made for perfect fodder for a serial killer book for the rest.
Have you ever found yourself actually being tempted to root for a serial killer?
I mean, besides Dexter Morgan.
Luckily, in spite of it all, I'm still not so jaded and depraved that I wasn't rooting for Kate and Tristan.
Okay, so on to the book.
The Shadow Sands reservoir is a popular diving spot near Kate Marshall's home. It had been created in the 1950s when a valley and the village of Shadow Sands was flooded out. Kate and her sixteen-year-old son Jake go out one day to see if they can locate the ruins of the old Shadow Sands church ... and, in the ruins, they discover a fully dressed and quite dead body of a young man not much older than Jake. The police right it off as an accident, but several weeks later Kate is contacted by the boy's mother. She had read up on Kate and felt that she (and Tristan) could uncover the truth as to what really happened to her son, Simon.
Of course, as soon as Kate starts to look into things nothing adds up the way that they're supposed to believe. They soon discover that Simon is the latest in a long line of mysteries at Shadow Sands and it gets even stranger. A new philosophy and religion professor at the university where Kate and Tristan work is studying local urban legends, such the "Fog Phantom" of Shadow Sands who was supposedly responsible for young people going missing: It comes up from nowhere and it gets you, disorients you into a blind panic...
And then she goes missing.
In the fog.
Spooky, right?
I love this about Robert Bryndza. He can make me shiver even when the heat is cranked up ... holds me glued to the pages even on a work night that never really seems to calm down for more than a few minutes at a time ... and keeps me guessing right up to the end.
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3 comments:
Sounds intense! I hope you are enjoying it and have a great weekend! https://cindysbookcorner.blogspot.com/2021/11/first-line-friday-27-memory-quilt.html
Yeah this definitely sounds right up my alley!! Happy weekend!
Wouldn't that be awful to scuba and find a dead body? Friday quotes
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