Excerpt from Shadow Man by Alan Drew, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The Santa Elena assistant police lieutenant, Ramon Hernandez, had been fishing partners with Ben's late father, and the police department was expanding. Ben got an interview, and the job offer came two weeks later. Rachel found a good job at the high school in El Toro, the next town over, and all the dimly lit stars aligned. Now here they were, nearly five years gone, in the gorgeous other side of L.A., and everything had finally gone to hell.

Sometimes he thought if he had stayed on the force in L.A., they would still be together. During the day, he and Rachel would be bound by their fear, and in the evening they'd share the relief that someone hadn't popped a hollow-tipped bullet into his chest. It was too good in Santa Elena, too easy to get bored, to be sucked into the vortex of complacency. You started to believe you deserved more than you had, deserved what your neighbor had—and they always had more—and once you started thinking like that there was an anxiousness that set in on you, a rotting dissatisfaction. Maybe that's what happened to them after they moved here. When you had it bad, you were glad for the good, any good. When you had it good, you wanted it better.

Emma's window was dark, glowing only with a string of white Christmas lights she kept hung from the ceiling year-round. He got out of the car and walked the sprinkler-dampened grass to the back of the condo. As he suspected, the sliding glass door was pulled open, just the screen separating outside from in. He tugged on the plastic handle, but the lock was engaged. He found the penknife in his coat pocket, jimmied the lock free, and slid the door open. Click locks were nothing; door locks could be picked with a paper clip. Only deadbolts were worth a damn. He stood there for a moment in the dark, waiting to hear Rachel moving upstairs. Silence. It was too easy to get in; thirty seconds and the killer could be standing in the family room. He closed the screen and the sliding glass door, engaging both locks. He walked the edge of the room, jumping around the creaky spots on the floor— he'd visited enough to know such things— and slid closed and locked the window in the kitchen. A pad of paper was sitting near the phone and he wrote Rachel a note. You're going to be pissed off, he wrote, but ask me about it later. He checked the coffeemaker. The timer wasn't set, no coffee in the filter. Ben had always taken care of the coffee, a full pot at 5:30 a.m. every day. He found the tin in the cupboard and scooped a few spoonfuls into the filter. He set the timer, pressed start, and left the note propped up against a clean coffee mug. He snuck through the hallway into the foyer and stood gazing up at the weak light emanating from Emma's cracked bedroom door. He wanted to go up there, wanted to kiss his daughter, wanted to crawl into bed with Rachel. He wanted to rewind the last five years of their lives together, pinpoint the places he'd screwed up, and fix them all. But of all the useless thoughts in the world, this was the most useless. All you could do was say you were sorry and hope they believed it.He opened the front door by millimeters, turned the door-handle lock— man, they needed a deadbolt— and stepped out into the night, pulling the door closed behind him and checking it twice to make sure the lock was engaged.

Excerpted from Shadow Man by Alan Drew. Copyright © 2017 by Alan Drew. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.