SHADOW VALLEY

An act of violence upends the life of the son of two dangerous operatives in Wolf’s thriller.

Hector Montoya and Lindsay Sheldon love their son, Heath, but the life they’ve chosen—Hector as a hired killer, and Lindsay as his former handler who deserted the CIA—forces them to abandon their 1-year-old child in Panama on March 21, 1968. They’d prepared for this possibility and had a plan in place for Heath to be adopted by a couple Lindsay had met. Twenty years later, Heath is in his childhood home in the outskirts of Shadow Valley, California, and his life isn’t going so well. Determined to help his ill adoptive mother stay at their ranch until her end, he deals marijuana at a local bar to make ends meet. Things change when he meets the adventurous Rori, and his focus shifts to her. Later, though, he finds out she’s an underage runaway, and her police-chief father, whom he’d known to be abusive, is on a mission to bring her back home. A violent fight results in a tragedy that puts him and Rori on the run and may put him face to face with his shadowy past. The story is a page-turner, engaging and raw, and the scenes of violence bring to mind a mix of older noir and Old West stories. One of the novel’s greatest qualities is its precise description of its setting throughout; “Shadow Valley’s slogan was, ‘A Town with True Western hospitality,’ ” Heath narrates at one point early on. “That might have been the case in the 1800’s, but now, in the 1980’s, it was a cesspool of crime and poverty with one of the highest murder rates in the world.” Although the characters often read as much older than they are, the story is consistently fast-paced and entertaining.

A brisk and gritty crime story.