Shadow Games

By Ed Gorman
Leisure Books, $5.50, pb orig

Here's another super thriller by the author of Cold Blue Midnight, Black River Falls, and Bloodmoon suggest italicizing book titles within the body of the review. To call his prose lean and mean is no disservice, because Gorman knows just how to tell a story using uncluttered, cinematic language that nevertheless surprises you with its sparse eloquence. 

Teen TV-heartthrob Cobey Williams (think Michael J. Fox or Kirk Cameron) has done a bad thing. Caught in the middle of raping and strangling a young groupie at a mall "event," he's sent to an institution where part of his therapy includes electroshock therapy. Fast-forward to the present, when a resurrected career has placed him in the public eye again, and he wakes up to find his latest girlfriend grotesquely murdered. The rub is, he's not altogether sure he didn't do it, since he had fallen off the wagon and blacked out. His evil mother-image/witch of an agent cleans up the crime scene, among other things. But did she kill the young woman? When he is inevitably fingered for the murder, Cobey runs, hoping to rely on W.J. Puckett, a private investigator he'd met years earlier, right after his institutional stay. Puckett starts to dig, as there may be several suspects who would want some sort of revenge on Cobey. 

Meanwhile, Detective Cozzens of the Chicago Police runs his own investigation, which takes several twists and turns through Puckett's. But there's more heartache in store for Cobey, as he struggles to learn on his own whether he is the monster everyone thinks he is, or whether someone close to him is not nearly as loving as Cobey thinks.

In Gorman's hands, the familiar plot takes several decidedly unexpected spins, using multiple viewpoints effectively to layer his portrait of the child star gone wrong. Gorman's cousin was child star Bobby Driscoll, doomed to a drug addict's lonely death, so his take on the teen star phenomenon has more bite than it might otherwise. While essentially a thriller and nearly traditional murder mystery, Shadow Games also manages to expose arcane practices of the entertainment industry without preaching.