Jack Shadow by Graeme Smith

Jack Shadow by Graeme Smith
Shadow Dance #1
Publisher: BWL Publishing
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Contemporary, Historical
Rating: 4 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

Jack Shadow. He’s heard them – every one of them. The jokes. They all start out the same. “See, this guy walks into a bar…” Well, that’s not him. That guy who walked into a bar. He’s the guy who walked out. It’s not amnesia. Near as anyone knows, he just doesn’t have a past. Near as anyone knows – or admits to. He doesn’t walk round a corner, and some guy from a car shoots at him because of something he did long ago.

Sure. Guys shoot at him. Hell, women too. But not for long ago. Mostly for last week. Where ‘last week’ is any week you choose. No, he just walked out of a bar. Were there piles of dead bodies behind him? A stacked deck he was dealing, or one he was dealt? He doesn’t know. Or care. But they were waiting, and they took him. The Dragon. Took him to make a difference. To wait for the time a beat of a gnat’s wing could change tomorrow. And Jack’s the gnat. Jack walked out of a bar.

The rest – the rest will be history. Some day. Not that he’ll be in it. Nobody remembers the gnats. Not if they did their job right. And Jack’s the best there is. Jack Shadow. Because some days – the last thing you need is a good guy.

Danger is the spice of life when one is in certain lines of work.

Jack had a well-rounded, intriguing personality that made me want to learn more about him. I appreciated his wry sense of humor and how intelligently and cautiously he approached every aspect of his work. He was the sort of character I’d want to hang out with during an emergency due to how closely he paid attention to small details in his environment as well as how prepared he was for a wide variety of possible outcomes in life, both positive and negative.

This was one of those tales that tossed the reader into the action and asked us to figure out what was happening as the protagonist attempted to stay alive and well. As much as I enjoy the challenge of this style of writing in general, I did find myself wishing for a little more exposition in the beginning in this case. Even a few more paragraphs worth of it would have catapulted this to a five-star rating for me as I enjoyed everything else about it and thought Jack was definitely someone worth getting to know better.

The time travel aspects of the storyline were handled nicely. It can be a complicated topic, especially when more than one trip is involved or when multiple characters are involved, so I was glad to see Mr. Smith spend some time digging into the risks involved and what the characters hoped to earn from their hard work.

Jack Shadow was fast-paced and adventurous.