BlackFive

The following review is a special for BlackFive readers provided by Elise Cooper. You can read all of our book reviews and author interviews by clicking on the Books category link in the right side bar.

Shadow Girl by Gerry Schmitt is the second installment in the Afton Tangler series. It features a family liaison officer who works for the Minneapolis police department. The beginning of each book starts out with an intense scene, setting the atmosphere for the rest of the story.

Some may wonder how could a family liaison officer be the featured character for a thriller. Schmitt does a great job creating stories that are riveting, but also believable. Most everyone enjoys playing detective while reading or watching a TV show, and Afton is no different. The difference is that in the story she gets to actually play detective, using her instincts in real life situations.

Schmitt noted, “Afton has all the promising signs of being a detective. In order to make her one I would need to check out the legality of how I could realistically change her profession. According to most police departments rules she would have to be a rookie first and do some time on the streets. Possibly there might be a special way she can jump the gun.”

The saying if you do not have your health, you do not have anything springs true in the novel. Leland Odin made his fortune launching a home shopping network, but his millions can’t save his life. On the list for a heart transplant, the ailing businessman sees all hope lost when the helicopter carrying his donor heart is shot out of the sky, and the heart flies into a University dorm room.

Enjoying the ability to write big opening scenes, Schmitt wants those to be “whiz bang acts. I was going to write this helicopter scene in the first Afton book, but decided to put it in this one instead. I even went to the University of Minnesota to scout out a location for where the heart could end up. What I put in about the donor heart is based on a woman I knew who had been waiting for a transplant, but never made it. I knew that a heart is only viable for a certain amount of hours and is only offered to someone close to the area of where the donor originated.”

In close proximity to the attack Afton and her partner Max Montgomery realize that the attack has something to do with wanting Odin dead, and concentrate the investigation on who wanted him dead and why. Was it family, a business partner, or someone seeking revenge? As Afton and her partner get closer to discovering who is behind the horrific crime scenes, the violence turns personal as she, her family, and her dog are threatened and assaulted.

In each book of this series her villains are very creepy. “I enjoy writing the villain, making them evil, conniving, greedy, and arrogant. If written well they should be interesting characters. I always put in some backstory on them for readers to understand how they become an antagonist. In this novel, the evildoer, Mom Chao Cherry, an American, not a Dragon Lady, was dragged to Asia by her missionary parents who were killed. She was then struck in an orphanage and became a child sex slave. After escaping she became a Kingpin in the drug world. I did a lot of research on Asian criminal organizations and have been to China, Japan, and Indonesia. I knew these gangs are brutal and make the Columbians look like Boy Scouts.”

Schmitt leaves nothing to the readers’ imagination regarding the violence. People should make sure they have some time when reading this because they will not want to put the book down.