[.ca] Shadow Men (ISBN 0451411811)

Third In The Series: Shadow Men by Jonathon King:
This third novel in the series finds Max Freeman still living his self imposed exile deep in the Florida Everglades. Picking up a short time after the events depicted in "A Visible Darkness," Max is still able to live in his shack. His isolation, except for the occasional private investigator job for his friend and attorney, Billy Manchester, has allowed him to slowly come to grips with his actions extensively detailed in the first novel "The Blue Edge Of Midnight." However, the past still bothers him and he sees his pain reflected in the eyes of Billy's latest client. Mark Mayes is a college student in Atlanta, Georgia and is considering going into the seminary. But, before he can do that, he needs answers about a painful family legacy. Mayes has found a number of letters, yellowed and brittle with age, in his grandmother's attic. The letters seem to indicate that his great-grandfather and two uncles who died in 1923 while working for a private company trying to build the first road across the Everglades may have been murdered. That road became the Tamiami Trail and like his long dead relatives something rarely spoken of in his family. If they were murdered, possibly on behalf of the company that was the law to itself in the merciless swamp, Mayes wants to take legal action against the company assuming it or some form of it still exists. The great building projects have always taken many lives. The Tamiami Trail is no different in that it too is built upon the bones of the dead. But, as Max reads the copies of the letters again in lantern light in his shack, he too is struck by the power of the letters and the message of fear and desperation they convey. Something sinister was at work then and is still at work today resulting on an attempt on Max's life and other efforts to warn him off even before he starts work. It soon becomes clear that there are some that don't care to have the past uncovered and will stop at nothing to keep it that way. While little is added to the development of the Max Freeman character, the author manages to skillfully build on the characters of others by way of two engaging secondary storylines involving characters familiar to readers of this series. Written with a prose style that reminds the reader of James Lee Burke where a few words create a powerful mental image, Jonathon King consistently brings the beauty of the Everglades alive as well as the despair and evil that lurks in the hearts of some. This author is one of the very few that can pull the reader in so deeply into his world while he delivers a complex and twisting tale of murder and deceit. His books are escapist literature and instead are far from it as they leave mental images not soon forgotten.

Move over, Michael Connelly and Dennis Lehane!:
Jonathon King thanks his friend Michael Connelly in the acknowledgments for SHADOW MEN, and it's as if he has somehow channeled Connelly, Dennis Lehane, and John D. MacDonald. All of King's three books are very good, but this one is the best -- weaving a 70-year-old mystery with the tangled past and present of protagonist Max Freeman, a former Philadelphia cop now living in a shack in the Florida Everglades. It's very well plotted, and the secondary characters are nicely drawn. King's descriptions of Florida are so evocative you can hear the waves on the beach and breathe the humid air of the Glades. (Maybe he channels James Lee Burke, too. Don't miss the quick reference to a cap from "Robicheaux's Dock and Bait Shop.") Jonathon King deserves to be much better known than he is. You saw it here first!

He can write:
I'll have to get the earlier books, because this man is a pro. He can give you the texture of the Glades and the taste of the city.

Glades and glitz, atmosphere and action:
The prologue to the latest Max Freeman novel homes in on a father and his two sons as they are hunted down and shot while trying to escape the first road-building project in the Everglades. So, as ex-cop Max sits in his lawyer friend Billy Manchester's Miami penthouse apartment reading 80-year-old letters from Cyrus Mayes, the reader already knows the man's fate. Building the Tamiami Trail across the broad Everglades swamp in 1923 was a slow slog through heat, muck, snakes, alligators and, maybe worst of all, insects. Mayes' recently recovered letters tell of captive labor and runaway workers who are never heard from again, so Cyrus' grandson suspects foul play. But he wants to know for sure. And the road-building company (which could still be legally liable) has stonewalled him. Intrigued, Max takes the letters back to the refuge of his sturdy Glades shack, where a suspicious early morning fire adds to his troubles without distracting his investigation. He braves the closed world of Glades natives to leave a message for the enigmatic Nate Brown (previously seen in "Visible Darkness"), meets up with his cop girlfriend Sherry Richards (who's preoccupied with an extracurricular case concerning an abusive stalker cop), and then drops off a piece of his burned shack to a forensics lab. While the Mayes case stays in the forefront, King weaves in his subplots seamlessly, revisiting his old demons and working out his present. Trailed by hired thugs, Max pursues his leads into the past and through generations. The action culminates in an all-out boat chase through the Glades, which resonates with the snap of alligator jaws and the hum of mosquitoes. Fine hard-and-soft-boiled prose, with quirky, believable characters, and an atmosphere that veers from the timeless mystery of the Everglades to the up-to-the-minute dazzle of the urban coast, King's series continues to shine.

"Something was coming...I knew I would not welcome it":
Edgar Award winning author Jonathon King presents his third novel in the Max Freeman series. I have really enjoyed all three books and specially like the way in which the author allows us glimpses of Max's past in each of the novels, letting us build an ever-growing detailed depiction of the main character. In the previous books, we found out about the episode that made Max leave the Philly police department and "retire" to the Everglades; now King takes us deeper into the relationship between Max and his father. Billy, Max's attorney and best friend, has a client that found a bunch of letters from one of his ancestors who worked along with his two sons in the construction of the Tamiami Trail. The letters describe the hardships they had to go through, as well as a series of "accidents" suffered by some of the workers who decided they had enough and tried to leave the project and return to civilization. At one point the letters stopped and nobody ever heard from the three men again. Billy requests Max's help in investigating what happened, and this make some people very nervous. At the same time, the DA is trying to evict Max from his shack in the Everglades and someone is going through the trouble of threatening Max and attacking his dwelling. Sherry Richards, the police officer Max "discovered" and fell for in the previous novel is still around and the relationship is still on track. However, a fellow female officer of Richard's is the victim of abuse by her lover, who is also a cop, and Max and Richards end up involved in the issue. These events are the ones that get Max to recall the events from the past that relate to his father. Jonathon King is moving forward through this series with a sure step and without losing intensity. In my particular case, I enjoy the fact that the novel is set up in the Miami / Ft. Lauderdale area, since I lived there for a couple of years and can "see" the places the author describes very clearly. Also, I have driven through the Tamiami Trail several times, and it is interesting to know at least part of the history on its construction, even though some of the facts presented by King are fiction.