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

Ben and Emma reached the top of the hill now, the fledgling city of Rancho Santa Elena spreading beneath them in a patchwork of unfinished grids. Even when Ben was a kid, the basin had been mostly empty—a dusty street with a single Esso gas station, the criss-crossing runways of the Marine air base, a brand-new housing tract out by the new university, a few outlying buildings for ranchers and strawberry pickers. Now Rancho Santa Elena spread in an irregular geometry from the ocean to the base of the eastern hills of the Santa Ana Mountains, where newly paved roads cut swaths through orange groves. The center of town, the part of the master plan that was finished, looked vaguely Spanish—peaks of red-tiled rooftops organized in neat rows, man-made lakes with imported ducks, greenbelts cutting pathways for joggers and bicyclists. It was like watching a virus consume the soft tissue of land, spreading to join Los Angeles to the north.

A sudden screech, and an F-4 fighter jet roared above Emma's head. Tin Man leapt backward, and Gus startled and bucked, losing his purchase on the rocky trail.

"Heels in," he called out to Emma, as one of her hands lost grip on the reins.

Ben dug his boot heels into Tin Man's flanks and the horse steadied, but Gus stumbled down the hill and Emma flipped backward, thumping solidly on her back in the dirt. Ben was off Tin Man, rushing to her, and by the time he was there she was already sitting up, cursing the plane and its pilot.

"Asshole," she said, slapping dust from her jeans.

"You all right?" Ben said, his hand on her back.

"No." She slapped the ground, her brown eyes lit with fury. "I want to kill that guy."

"Anything broken?"

"No," she said, standing now. "Where's Gus?"

"Don't worry about the horse." She had fallen before, of course, but his panic never changed about it. "Just sit. Make sure your ribs are in the right place."

He touched the side of her back, pressed a little. She elbowed his hands away.

"I'm fine, Dad."

She went to Gus, who was shaking in a clump of cactus, a few thorns stabbing his flank. She hugged the horse's chest as Ben yanked the thorns out, points of blood bubbling out of the skin. The jet swerved around the eastern hills, dropped its landing gear, and glided to the tarmac.

"Asshole," Ben said.

"Yeah," Emma said, smiling. "Took the words right out of my mouth."


It was nearly dark when they got back to the house, the western sky a propane blue. Emma walked the horses past his unmarked police cruiser and into the barn, and Ben retrieved a Ziploc bag of ice from the house and tried to hold it to Emma's back.

"Thanks, Dad," she said, hoisting the saddle off Gus, "but I'm fine."

He let her be and they worked their tacks alone, the rushing sound of the 405 Freeway in the distance.

Ben's house was in the flats on the edge of the city, down a dirt road that ended at a cattle fence that closed off Laguna Canyon and the coastal hills, a patch of wilderness, and the last of the old ranch. The place was a low-slung adobe, set in a carved-out square of orange grove—his father's house, a cowboy's joint, the house Ben had lived in until he was eleven. Emma had dubbed it "Casa de la Wade" three years before and the name stuck; they'd even fashioned a sign out of acetylene-torched wood and nailed it above the front door. When he and Rachel had moved back here from L.A. four years ago, they spent the first year in a rented apartment near the new university. He would drive out every once in a while to look in on the old place—the windows boarded up, the barn roof sagging. He had asked around at the corporate offices of the new "Rancho," out by John Wayne Airport. Some of the suits remembered his dad from back when it was a working ranch, not a corporation with valuable real estate to sell, and out of respect to his father's memory they let him have it for a moderately inflated price. The house and its acre of land hadn't then been part of the town's master plan; it was in the flight path of the military jets, and the Marines had wanted at least a quarter-mile perimeter of open land surrounding the runways in case an F-4 bit it on approach. The feds, though, had recently decided to close the base, and suddenly the Rancho Santa Elena Corporation zeroed in on the surrounding land. Letters from the Rancho's lawyers had already offered him 10 percent over market value for the place. He had written back and simply said, Not interested, though he knew they wouldn't give up so easily. The Rancho had already declared eminent domain to bulldoze artist cottages in Laguna Canyon. It had its sights set on the old cowboy camp at Bommer Canyon, too, just up the hill from Ben's place.

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.