
From The Shadows, by David Carter introduces us to thirty-one-year-old, Bobby Blaise (or Blaze as he prefers to be known). Blaze was the black sheep of his family and left the small, rural, New Zealand town of Glendale, where is mother was the principal of the Catholic Boarding school in the town, some fifteen years earlier. Blaze is on a mission – a mission to pay his mother back for the perceived mistreatment of him as a child and to lure into the open a man who had stolen Bobby’s innocence all those years before, a man known as The Watcher. Blaze stands and watches as his old school burns to the ground and waits patiently for his arrest, sure in the knowledge that The Watcher will now be well aware Blaze is back in town and will be unable to resist coming out of hiding to finish what he started all those years earlier. For Blaze, it is payback time.
I was initially drawn to this book by its setting of rural New Zealand. As an expatriate New Zealander I fancied reading something set in my home land. What I got from David Carter was an incredibly fast-paced and exciting story. There are some books that truly you cannot put down and From The Shadows was very much one of those books. Carter has a style that is exciting and perfectly suited to this type of taut thriller genre. Beware, though, this book is not for the faint of heart. The author’s descriptions of the violence are both fulsome and graphic. If you are in the slightest squeamish, this book may not be for you. The biggest compliment I can pay any author of a full-length novel is to say he/she left me wanting more. The good news is From The Shadows is slated as the first in the “Blaze” series, so that is indeed good news. An excellent, what appears to be a debut novel. I will be following this author closely.
