(hb; 1997: third book in the Jane Whitefield series)
From the inside flap
“Jane Whitefield is a
‘guide’—she leads desperate people away from danger into safe places and gives
them new identities. In Shadow Woman, Jane designs a harrowing escape
for Pete Hatcher, a Las Vegas casino executive whose suspicious employers are
about to kill him. Once her client is safe, Jane makes herself vanish and
retires from her dangerous profession to marry the man she loves. But the risky
business she left behind returns with terrible urgency on the night she
receives Pete Hatcher’s call for help. A man and a woman who can only be an
assassination team have found his hiding place, and Jane must beat the killers
to their prey. She needs all the courage, fortitude, and intelligence of her
Native American heritage to keep Hatcher alive. And this time, the killers know
she’s coming.”
Review
Like the preceding Whitefield novel, Dance for the Dead, Shadow Woman is light on Indian practicality and wisdom tales and focuses on the action, immediate storyline, and characters—and what a doozy some of the characters are! Linda Thompson and Earl Bliss, within the context of the Whitefield novels, might just be the most hair-raising and perverse psychosexual skip tracers/murderers Jane has faced. Not only that, Pete Seaver, head of security and occasional killer for incorporated Las Vegas mobsters (Pleasure, Inc.) is beginning to have doubts about his Las Vegas employers and Thompson and Bliss, and has set out to get their prey, Hatcher and, if necessary, Whitefield.
For the most part, Shadow is
an excellent, intense read, with a darkly funny ending. It deftly avoids (possibly)
melodramatic situations between Jane and her laid-back fiancé, Carey McKinnon, who
is—for this reader, anyway—so naïve and trusting he borders on people-stupid/unrealistic. Despite
this relatively character nit, Shadow works as an above-average novel,
one worth owning. Followed by The Face Changers.
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