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Henry Malone #2
Complicated Shadows
The request is simple: help an old friend out on a missing persons case. But Henry Malone should have known nothing is ever as simple as it seems.
When Pete Calhoun, a retired West Virginia state trooper, comes to Serenity to see Henry, it's not just to reunite with a former colleague. Pete needs Henry's help finding Isaac Martin, a computer expert who's vanished at the cusp of a business deal possibly worth millions.
Henry is thrown in a growing world of secrets, from Isaac Martin's real identity to Pete's motives to find the missing man. Henry and his well-armed friend and AA sponsor Woody are dragged deep into a world of shadowy electronic currency, where the FBI, rival international criminal organizations, and a deadly family of marijuana farmers compete, with Isaac as the ultimate prize.
250 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 16, 2016
71 people are currently reading
40 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
June 10, 2022
James D. F. Hannah's Henry Malone private-eye mysteries are growing on me, a little, and COMPLICATED SHADOWS furthers that growth, a little. I mostly steer clear of second and subsequent volumes in P.I. series oeuvres, finding them usually to be increasingly pallid exercises in brand management with increasingly diminished returns.
COMPLICATED SHADOWS doesn't entirely escape the suction of that; Hannah is an author who has diligently studied the subgenre and written to what he sees as a a winning formula, with no trope left untouched. That said, he does so in winning fashion, with a brisk, snappy writing style full of local color and occasional character depth that overcomes some over-the-top plotting, over-the-top moral righteousness and dialogue so glib it could be slathered in bacon grease and served with grits for breakfast.
Henry Malone, crippled ex-cop turned semi-pro private eye, is a walking list of genre clichés, down to the drinking problem, the tragedies in his past, and the standard-issue accessories for a West Virginia setting: a battered pickup truck, a battered dog and a battered dark-half sidekick. But in the course of cycling through these clichés, an appealing vulnerability pokes its head out from time to time. One instance comes when a law-enforcement acquaintance correctly pegs Henry as the sidekick of the duo (forcing him to sideline his dark half to injury so he doesn't disappear between the lines of his own narration).
Another instance comes when his estranged wife asks him to sign the divorce papers so they can both move on. In doing so, she pokes deft holes in what he sees as a principled and manly refusal to deal with reality: "The problem was us. Or the problem was you and me, because there wasn’t an ‘us.’ You changed after the shooting. I told myself you’d be okay, that you’d pull your shit together and do what you needed to get well, but you didn’t. You fought it. You couldn’t be a cop anymore, so you made yourself miserable, and you made me miserable. And when you stopped drinking, it got worse, and you blamed me for your unhappiness. The only moods you had left were resentful and angry. I hit my limit, and for me to drink away my hurt would have killed me. But I’m well aware what a bitch this makes me, because I’m the woman who left her wounded ex-cop husband after he got sober. I’m the person you root against in a movie. But our marriage stopped feeling right for me, Henry, that’s all. The space your anger took up left no room for me.” That Henry hears that, and still won't sign the papers, gives him a pathos that pleasurably upends all his standard-issue righteous-dude schtick, and suggests a complex character-rich future direction for the series.
Beyond that, I enjoyed Hannah's observational eye. Lines like "Laundromats are depressing. There are few things more disheartening than gathering in a communal area with strangers so you can wash and fold your T-shirts. The faces are almost always the same. There are mothers who seem as if they’re dancing on a razor’s edge between leaving the snot-nosed kids on the floor as they scream they want a bag of Funyuns and bringing out a tranquilizer gun. There are old men who split their attention between the TVs mounted beneath the ceilings and the endless rainbow of clothes running circles in the dryers, and their expressions say they can’t keep up with the plot of either. Over there will be a young couple, rail thin and happy, blissfully in love, playfully throwing her thongs and B-cup bras at one another, without a clue that adulthood and high-waisted full-cut panties are in their future" really stick the landing, and tell you something useful about the world the hero lives in and how he looks out upon it. There's cynicism in these passages, but it's cut with a chunk of wistful empathy as well, because he's not much removed from the people he mocks, and he knows it. Hannah would do well to more deeply explore this aspect of Henry Malone's character.
All that is a prose style that briskly flips the the pages but not in empty-calories Patterson style. I found myself coming back to COMPLICATED SHADOWS as relief from more complicated novels, and enjoying the experience of finding little complications popping up in an otherwise clockwork exercise after being buried in dense thickets of ambitious writing. That sounds like damning with faint praise, but it really isn't. Every reader needs a balanced literary diet, and the Henry Malone novels are the bacon slices next to my kale smoothies.
COMPLICATED SHADOWS doesn't entirely escape the suction of that; Hannah is an author who has diligently studied the subgenre and written to what he sees as a a winning formula, with no trope left untouched. That said, he does so in winning fashion, with a brisk, snappy writing style full of local color and occasional character depth that overcomes some over-the-top plotting, over-the-top moral righteousness and dialogue so glib it could be slathered in bacon grease and served with grits for breakfast.
Henry Malone, crippled ex-cop turned semi-pro private eye, is a walking list of genre clichés, down to the drinking problem, the tragedies in his past, and the standard-issue accessories for a West Virginia setting: a battered pickup truck, a battered dog and a battered dark-half sidekick. But in the course of cycling through these clichés, an appealing vulnerability pokes its head out from time to time. One instance comes when a law-enforcement acquaintance correctly pegs Henry as the sidekick of the duo (forcing him to sideline his dark half to injury so he doesn't disappear between the lines of his own narration).
Another instance comes when his estranged wife asks him to sign the divorce papers so they can both move on. In doing so, she pokes deft holes in what he sees as a principled and manly refusal to deal with reality: "The problem was us. Or the problem was you and me, because there wasn’t an ‘us.’ You changed after the shooting. I told myself you’d be okay, that you’d pull your shit together and do what you needed to get well, but you didn’t. You fought it. You couldn’t be a cop anymore, so you made yourself miserable, and you made me miserable. And when you stopped drinking, it got worse, and you blamed me for your unhappiness. The only moods you had left were resentful and angry. I hit my limit, and for me to drink away my hurt would have killed me. But I’m well aware what a bitch this makes me, because I’m the woman who left her wounded ex-cop husband after he got sober. I’m the person you root against in a movie. But our marriage stopped feeling right for me, Henry, that’s all. The space your anger took up left no room for me.” That Henry hears that, and still won't sign the papers, gives him a pathos that pleasurably upends all his standard-issue righteous-dude schtick, and suggests a complex character-rich future direction for the series.
Beyond that, I enjoyed Hannah's observational eye. Lines like "Laundromats are depressing. There are few things more disheartening than gathering in a communal area with strangers so you can wash and fold your T-shirts. The faces are almost always the same. There are mothers who seem as if they’re dancing on a razor’s edge between leaving the snot-nosed kids on the floor as they scream they want a bag of Funyuns and bringing out a tranquilizer gun. There are old men who split their attention between the TVs mounted beneath the ceilings and the endless rainbow of clothes running circles in the dryers, and their expressions say they can’t keep up with the plot of either. Over there will be a young couple, rail thin and happy, blissfully in love, playfully throwing her thongs and B-cup bras at one another, without a clue that adulthood and high-waisted full-cut panties are in their future" really stick the landing, and tell you something useful about the world the hero lives in and how he looks out upon it. There's cynicism in these passages, but it's cut with a chunk of wistful empathy as well, because he's not much removed from the people he mocks, and he knows it. Hannah would do well to more deeply explore this aspect of Henry Malone's character.
All that is a prose style that briskly flips the the pages but not in empty-calories Patterson style. I found myself coming back to COMPLICATED SHADOWS as relief from more complicated novels, and enjoying the experience of finding little complications popping up in an otherwise clockwork exercise after being buried in dense thickets of ambitious writing. That sounds like damning with faint praise, but it really isn't. Every reader needs a balanced literary diet, and the Henry Malone novels are the bacon slices next to my kale smoothies.
July 8, 2017
Sequels can easily be a miss more often than a hit, but Complicated Shadows, the novel succeeding Midnight Lullaby by James D.F. Hannah, does a pretty good job at continuing a fun yet exciting story about Henry Malone, a former state trooper with a gimp leg and a snarky attitude. That and crime still don’t go together, but he managed to get himself in another mess that do just that.
Henry has to face the fact that he isn’t moving forward in life, and these things are brought to the forefront while he’s also trying to save a man’s life and keep his heart beating at the same time.
Like many good books, it’s the unknown that keeps one interesting, and this one makes Henry’s social life an important part of the story while also including that danger and hilarious big mouth that made the first one great. What makes this one different and engaging is that Henry's life is changing. It's not just another unanswered question; it's the character in his world. He's interacting. It's easy to lose a character to a repetitive plot structure, especially for mysteries and crime, and Hannah avoids that by giving Henry Malone a life he has to live. On top of that, half the time it's a wonder that he's alive in the first place, which of course makes it rather great.
I can give up closure, but the ending was vague enough that I wasn’t sure whether I was being given the answer. Things were muddled enough that it could have been unknown completely or discovered in some way, but there seemed to have been a few educated guesses that left me without an answer (which is fine) but also without knowing the weight of the educated guesses (less fine). This might sound confusing, but a story ends either with answers or intended lingering questions. The characters guessed in the end, and it left me, as a reader, unsure of whether I was meant to believe the guesses and take them as truths. I do appreciate, however, one part of the ending that Henry did alone because it served its own bit of justice, and it was pretty funny to boot. When a days-old sock is involved, you'll know what scene I'm referring to.
Despite these things, the story is still great and the characters are greater. I want to follow Henry and Woody on their next journey. I just hope it’s not another drug thing. If it is, Hannah did a good job of writing a story with different characters who made the plot unique in its own light. I’ll be open to the story the same way; I just simply hope I don’t have to be. Either way, I'm going to read it. It's a fun time.
Henry has to face the fact that he isn’t moving forward in life, and these things are brought to the forefront while he’s also trying to save a man’s life and keep his heart beating at the same time.
Like many good books, it’s the unknown that keeps one interesting, and this one makes Henry’s social life an important part of the story while also including that danger and hilarious big mouth that made the first one great. What makes this one different and engaging is that Henry's life is changing. It's not just another unanswered question; it's the character in his world. He's interacting. It's easy to lose a character to a repetitive plot structure, especially for mysteries and crime, and Hannah avoids that by giving Henry Malone a life he has to live. On top of that, half the time it's a wonder that he's alive in the first place, which of course makes it rather great.
I can give up closure, but the ending was vague enough that I wasn’t sure whether I was being given the answer. Things were muddled enough that it could have been unknown completely or discovered in some way, but there seemed to have been a few educated guesses that left me without an answer (which is fine) but also without knowing the weight of the educated guesses (less fine). This might sound confusing, but a story ends either with answers or intended lingering questions. The characters guessed in the end, and it left me, as a reader, unsure of whether I was meant to believe the guesses and take them as truths. I do appreciate, however, one part of the ending that Henry did alone because it served its own bit of justice, and it was pretty funny to boot. When a days-old sock is involved, you'll know what scene I'm referring to.
Despite these things, the story is still great and the characters are greater. I want to follow Henry and Woody on their next journey. I just hope it’s not another drug thing. If it is, Hannah did a good job of writing a story with different characters who made the plot unique in its own light. I’ll be open to the story the same way; I just simply hope I don’t have to be. Either way, I'm going to read it. It's a fun time.
December 22, 2018
Good book
I'm not even finished with the whole book yet but I can tell it's another 5 star book. The witty dialogue is refreshing and I find myself wishing I could write like James Hannah.
I'm not even finished with the whole book yet but I can tell it's another 5 star book. The witty dialogue is refreshing and I find myself wishing I could write like James Hannah.
June 15, 2020
Good characters but editing\proofreading needs work
Plot, story, characters are all great. Just some really poor proofreading skills make the book tougher to read than it should be.
Plot, story, characters are all great. Just some really poor proofreading skills make the book tougher to read than it should be.
October 2, 2023
I'm enjoying these books but the publisher really needs to invest in a good copyeditor.
February 5, 2024
Very gritty and dark. Great character work really shines through here too. Big fan of this series so far.
November 15, 2024
Book two of a terrific series. Great characters and story
February 26, 2025
This is a very enjoyable series, well written, great characters and realistic situations. I’m surprised that this author is not better known. Highly recommended to thriller, mystery readers!
March 5, 2023
LOVED IT. The perfect beach read... since I am in Cancun. Laughed out loud a number of times. Great dialogue and writing. James D.F. Hannah's Henry Malone is my kinda snarky a-hole. Highly recommend.
October 25, 2022
Mr. Hannah knows how to write a story! This is the second in the Henry Malone series and a great follow-up. Fast pace, action packed with a sarcastic wit as a reader you can’t go wrong spending your time on this novel.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews