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

"Forgetting something?" Ben called through the cracked door. "Where's my kiss?"

"Geez, Dad," Emma said, pushing her way between her mother and the door. She leaned forward and deigned to present him her cheek, and Ben took advantage of the wide-open door to once-over the professor sitting on the couch. "Hey," Ben said, nodding once.

"How are you this evening?" the man said, not even bothering to uncross his legs.

Pompous ass. "Got any outstanding parking tickets?" Ben said in a serious voice.

The man shifted his weight on the couch.

"Ben," Rachel said, pushing him back from the door.

"A joke," Ben said, holding up his hands. "Just a little police humor."

"Go do your job, Ben," Rachel said, and then she closed the door.

A body was growing cold seven miles away, but he walked to the carport anyway, trying his hunch on the vehicles, looking for a University of California faculty parking tag, a meat is murder bumper sticker, anything that would give the man away as an elitist wimp. And on the fifteen-minute drive down to Mission Viejo, riding the shoulder past a red sea of taillights, all he could think about was that man's soft hands on his ex-wife's skin in the bedroom next to where their daughter slept.


The house was on Mar Vista, off Alicia Parkway, .46 miles from the 5 Freeway, according to his odometer. The street was already a carnival, with neighbors straining the yellow tape and half of the Mission Viejo police force parked on the road, cruiser lights spinning blue and red circles. When Ben pulled up, Rafferty was standing on the porch, giving directions to a uniform. It was 7:47; Ben wrote it down on a yellow legal pad sitting on the passenger seat. Rafferty saw Ben's cruiser and waved him in.

Rafferty had been a vice detective in L.A., and he took the job in Mission Viejo for the same reasons Ben had taken the job in Santa Elena—safe neighborhoods, great schools for his two kids, little smog, good benefits and retirement plan, and an easier caseload, which allowed him to put his feet up at night with a beer and watch his sons swim in the backyard pool. Mission Viejo was another in a chain of master-planned communities in southern Orange County that set out to create an idyll that never existed—lakes where there had been rock, grass where there had been dust, shade where there had been sunlight. It survived on being the opposite of L.A.—clean, organized, boring. In L.A., people were used to crime scenes, used to the fact that there were bad people and they did bad things. Here, the neighbors crowding the crime-scene tape already carried the look of communal shock.

"Got a DB on the kitchen floor," Rafferty said, his voice pitched high with adrenaline. He placed his hand on Ben's shoulder; his palm was hot. "I'm glad you're here."

Since moving south, he and Rafferty had worked a couple of cases together—an illegal-immigrant smuggling operation with tentacles in both Mission Viejo and Santa Elena, a medical-insurance fraud case.

"Homicide's not vice, is it?" Ben said.

"At least no drugged-out chick is screaming at me," Rafferty said without any humor.

Ben could feel his blood pressure rise when they walked into the house. It was brutally hot, the heat of the day still trapped by the walls of the house. The foyer was lined with pictures of children or grandchildren, their smiling faces pinned behind glass. The living room was tidy—the carpet recently vacuumed, magazines stacked on a coffee table. Glass figurines—panda bears, cows, miniature unicorns, a seagull with wings outstretched—sparkled in a lighted cabinet against the far wall. A cheap oil painting of a wave catching the light of sunset, probably purchased at a convention-center art sale, hung askew. It wasn't until he saw what was in the kitchen that he understood what had knocked it off-kilter.

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.