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

"Detective Wade on the line," Mendenhall said, his head poking through the half-open examination room door. "Needs you down in Mission Viejo."

"You wanna take over?"

Mendenhall, the lieutenant medical examiner, never taught classes. He felt it was beneath him to walk the UC students around, much less show them how to use a Stryker saw, so it was left to Natasha, his deputy. Charging her to teach the classes was Mendenhall's way of reminding her that a woman didn't belong in the medical examiner's office, though he was more than happy to let her do most of the work. Worse than his disdain for teaching, though, was Mendenhall's distaste for fieldwork. Too messy. He was all clinical, liked to keep his shoes clean.

"School's out early," he announced to her students.

Natasha was in Mission Viejo in thirty-five minutes, smoking cigarettes on the way to kill the stench of the examination room. The smell: It didn't bother her in the lab, but out in the world it did, when she felt it was tangled in her hair, trapped in the fibers of her clothes. That was the problem with being an ME: balancing the examination room and the outside world. Everything was clear in the medical examiner's office but not out here, not at all.

She ducked under the yellow tape in front of the house, stepped through the foyer into the kitchen, and came around the corner of the island to take in the scene.

"I thought this kind of thing didn't happen down here," she said to Ben, who was down on his haunches, taking notes on a yellow legal pad.

"It didn't," Ben said. "Until it did."

She set her kit down on the floor and knelt across from Ben. One of the deceased woman's blue eyes stared at her. She understood why Mendenhall didn't like the field. The examination room was impersonal, but kneeling next to a body on the floor of her own kitchen was a different thing. The woman had been alive just minutes before; the color was still in her cheeks. Alive was alive, dead was dead. Where the two met was the difficult part. In your mercy, she thought, turn the darkness of death into the dawn of new life. She hadn't been to Mass in years, but being on scene always brought out the Catholic schoolgirl in her. "Strangled," Ben said.

"I see that." She opened the kit and slipped on gloves. Petechiae. A necklace of bruises around the throat. "You been out riding?"

"How'd you know?"

"You smell like horse."

Fractured hyoid bone. The larynx caved in.

"You need anything, sweetheart?"

Natasha turned to find a detective standing over her, his badge dangling from his leather belt, his face full of condescension. "Yeah, honey," she said. Crime scenes were generally a boys' club, full of testosterone-driven machismo. "I need you and all these other idiots out of my crime scene."

Ben looked at the floor and smiled. The detective, without another word, cleared the kitchen. Cops. These entitled little boys.

"How's Emma?" Natasha asked. She had shared an In-N-Out burger with Ben and Emma a week ago—his invitation—but he hadn't called her since. A little over par for the course for him.

"She's a teenager." He shrugged.

"Ah, you're not her knight in shining armor anymore."

Ben flashed her an ironic look and then got back to business. "Seems like it's manual," Ben said, pointing to the woman's neck. "No ligature."

"Is that so?" Natasha said. "Go do your job, Ben, and let me do mine."

"Right," he said, slapping his thighs before standing up.

"One more thing," Natasha said. "What's her name?"

"Hold on. I got it written down."

Ben flipped pages on the legal pad while Natasha got down on her elbows, Dictaphone in hand, and examined the woman's neck. She would have passed out quickly, but the killer would have had to stare into her face for two to three minutes—a quiet face, a nice one—crushing the trachea, snuffing her out with his hands before the brain shut down.

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.