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    Shadow Boys
    Shadow Boys
    Shadow Boys
    Audiobook9 hours

    Shadow Boys

    Written by Harry Hunsicker

    3/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    A gritty, whip-smart thriller from acclaimed author Harry Hunsicker.

    For once, things are going well for former DEA contractor Jon Cantrell. He’s got a real job as a fix-it man for a law firm that specializes in handling government contracts. But when his ex-girlfriend Piper asks him to meet with a high-ranking police official and Cantrell is forced to take an off-the-books assignment to find a missing boy, everything starts to unravel.

    Not helping the situation is his client, Deputy Chief Raul Delgado, an up-and-coming politico carrying his own tragic burdens he doesn’t like to dwell on. Forty years earlier, a racist cop brutally killed Delgado’s brother. Now, in a weird twist of fate, Delgado works for the very department that altered his life.

    As Cantrell proceeds, he uncovers a puzzling link between Delgado, the missing boy, and a series of vigilante murders. As the link becomes clearer, Cantrell struggles to stay alive and find the missing child.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateDec 1, 2014
    ISBN9781491548745
    Shadow Boys
    Author

    Harry Hunsicker

    Harry Hunsicker is the former executive vice president of the Mystery Writers of America and the author of seven crime thrillers, including The Devil’s Country, the first Arlo Baines novel, and the Jon Cantrell and Lee Henry Oswald series. His work has been short-listed for both the Shamus and Thriller Awards. Hunsicker’s story “West of Nowhere,” originally published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, was selected for inclusion in the anthology The Best American Mystery Stories 2011. For more about Harry, visit him at www.harryhunsicker.com.

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    Reviews for Shadow Boys

    3/5

    23 ratings6 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Story was pretty good, just had a lot of different things going and seemed it was a struggle to get everything connected. Will read another Cantrell story.
    • 3/5
      My second novel from Amazon's Thomas and Mercer imprint, and a much better experience than the first - this one would be at 2.5 stars if half stars worked. Still, Shadow Boys left a lot to be desired. It's not really a mystery or a detective story; it's an episode in the life of a character who happens to work in a field where detecting shows up. Since it's about the character, not the story, the story ends with a whimper. The character, however, isn't a likeable, noble, or decent guy, and so the story is the only bait to make you want to spend time with him. Misdirection abounds, on a couple of different levels, postponing the realization that the story is thin. The writing itself was competent, and the pacing was decent (if you can tolerate a BOGOF special on flashbacks), but if in the end there isn't a gripping story or a character I want to spent time with, then it's hard to like the book.
    • 4/5
      Harry Hunsicker is a Dallas-based writer whose five crime novels, although they feature two different Mr. Fix-It-type characters, have all been set in that city. The first three books feature Lee Henry Oswald, a man whose very name is certain to cause him problems in a city still scarred by one of the most infamous political assassinations in American history. The main character of Hunsicker’s two most recent books, including The Shadow Boys, is one John Cantrell – ex-cop, ex-DEA contractor – who shares Mr. Oswald’s line of work.As The Shadow Boys opens, John Cantrell is happy enough with his new job, one in which he “fixes” problems for a local law firm. Cantrell is good at making problems go away, something that the firm and its clients appreciate. But when Piper, Cantrell’s ex-girlfriend, asks him to sit down with a high-ranking Dallas cop who needs some help, things get complicated fast. Raul Delgado, the Dallas white-collar cop in question, is looking for a little boy who has gone missing, but he would rather not involve the Dallas Police Department in his search for the boy. Delgado, as it turns out, has a soft spot for poor kids growing up on the streets of Dallas because years earlier he himself had been one of those kids. He, though, was one of the lucky ones. Someone cared enough about kids like him to offer him a chance at a different future, and now, forty years after he saw his brother die at the hands of a racist Dallas cop, Delgado is one of the highest ranking policemen in the entire city. Cantrell, largely because he still has a thing for his ex, reluctantly agrees to search for the missing boy. But, in the meantime, someone in Dallas has taken it upon himself to clean up the streets vigilante-style, and when that vigilante becomes aware of Cantrell’s search for the missing boy, part of Dallas turns into a war zone. Is the missing boy somehow tied to this killer? All Cantrell knows is that, if he is to survive long enough to find out, it is probably more important that he find the shooter than the missing boy.Hunsicker takes the reader on quite a ride in The Shadow Boys. There is no shortage of suspects – or for that matter, of good guys - in this noirish thriller, and readers failing to pay attention to plot and character development could get lost along the way. Keep that from happening…and this one will be a fun read.
    • 2/5
      Other reviewers go into the details of how and why the writing in this book is so unsatisfying. There is too much jumping around between characters and times and it all gets confusing. Who is talking? When is the action taking place? The plot is very unlikely and there is too much violence that has no purpose except to shock the reader.I received a review copy of "Shadow Boys" by Harry Hunsicker (Amazon Publishing) through NetGalley.com.
    • 2/5
      I received a copy of this novel through Kindle First Picks.This novel tells several parallel stories for the various characters as well as including the occasional flashback. For one character, the story is told in first person; for the rest of the characters, third person limited is used. I found this to be a bit jarring and frequently read paragraphs in which I wasn't sure which of the characters I was following (or in what time frame we were). While the storylines nominally feed a final outcome, the wrap up left me feeling a little flat. Some of the parallel/supporting plots are interesting, but they were unevenly developed. The approach also resulted in an excessive number of characters, seemingly central to the novel, that were poorly developed. Finally, the central conflict to be resolved wasn't clearly the central conflict until mid-way through the book. Overall, I was not impressed with the story, the characters, or the style of the novel.
    • 2/5
      Rating a book can be difficult at times, and this book is one of those times for me. It started out as a solid 4 stars. Hunsicker has a firm grasp on drawing a reader in with compelling sentences and interesting characters. By the time I was 1/3 into the book, it had dropped to a 3 star rating. By the end, it sat at 2 stars. While Hunsicker is a good writer as far as sentence structure and such, my problems came with his writing style. First there is the issue of tense switching. We start out with flashbacks of one character's life - not the main character - in third person present tense. Eventually those flashbacks, for reasons unknown, switch to past tense. Other characters randomly pop in an out with POV parts, some in third person past and some in third person present. The main character is written in first person past tense. As far as I could tell, there was no reasoning behind which tense to use or when to use it. Then we move on to the story's timeline, which is a jumbled mess. The flashbacks are not chronological. We move in and out of various years, merely for the purpose of showing us the back story of a character who, to me, is given far more importance than the main character is. These are long pieces, often short chapters. All these flashbacks make it difficult to gain a foothold in the present story.Then we have the plot, which is a different sort of jumbled mess. There is either no plot or too many plots, depending on your viewpoint. We follow Jon Cantrell as he plays fix-it man for his employer. There are many cases that we wander in and out of quickly. Rather than feeling like a coherent plot, this feels more like we're being shown how awesome the main character is as he juggles all his duties. Several of the "bad guys" in these various cases also have POV parts, so we go along into their lives which have pretty much nothing to do with anything the main character is doing. Hunsicker does attempt to pull the large variety of cases and characters together at the end, but this winds up feeling far too convenient and unrealistic. The main character doesn't seem to actually care about any of the cases he's working. Even the missing child case, which is mostly an afterthought throughout, doesn't seem all that important to him. If the main character doesn't care about what he's doing, it's hard for the reader to care.When I finally untangled myself at the end of this book, I felt like the aerobic exercise of following along was far more work than the story was worth.