Once Shadows Fall

Daniels’s competent first novel, a serial-killer thriller, leans heavily on Robert Harris’s two masterpieces of the genre, Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs. Det. Beth Sturgis, newly promoted to the robbery-homicide division of the Atlanta PD, is assigned to a brutal crime scene that echoes the killings committed years earlier by Howard Pell, a criminal genius known as the Scarecrow. But Pell remains locked up in extreme solitary confinement, so who committed these new murders? Beth solicits the help of retired FBI agent Jack Kale, who put away the Scarecrow after a life-and-death struggle. Kale is still suffering from acute PTSD and has no interest in aiding Beth’s investigation, but inch by inch she draws him in. It soon becomes apparent that Pell has spawned a disciple, who has dubbed himself the Soul Eater. Might Pell somehow be guiding the Soul Eater from his prison cell? Daniels fails to achieve Harris’s level of inspired madness, and the dawning romance between Beth and Jack saps the story’s tension toward the end. [em]Agent: Jane Dystel, Dystel Goderich Literary Management.[/em]