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Product Description
New York City, August 1889: within sight of Madison Square Park, a man lays dead in a darkened construction site. Jim Tupper, a Mohawk of the Iroquois nation, stands over the body. Within minutes he's seen. And as police whistles scream in the night, he runs, knowing there is but one place to hide.
With the police hounding him, Tupper makes his way back to the place he knows best-the vast, unsettled Adirondack wilderness. What he finds upon his return is both familiar and strange, a homeland torn by forces from within and without. But after surviving a deadly chase through the streets, back alleys, and underworld haunts of a teeming lower Manhattan, he is home, and Tupper sinks beneath the surface of the Adirondack forest, blending back into the landscape of his youth.
But he has left a trail of death behind, a trail leading dangerously close to a fantastic luxury hotel deep in the heart of the wilderness where Captain Tom Braddock and his family are vacationing. Worlds collide when Tom's son becomes the prime suspect in the murder of a young maid at the hotel. To clear him, Braddock has no choice but to find the illusive Indian, a man who knows the forest as well as Tom knows the streets. Determined to catch Tupper no matter the cost, Braddock launches an epic chase through more than a hundred miles of Adirondack lakes, rivers and forest, his guide the legendary Mitchell Sabattis.
But not all in the Adirondacks is as it appears. Powerful forces have been set in motion, and as developers make manifest their need to rein in the wilderness, Tom too wonders what the vast forests might hold. Will he find the clues he needs to exonerate his son and put a killer behind bars? Or will the great forest smother its secrets in shadow until its price has been paid in blood?
Amazon.com Review
"Place isn’t healthy," police captain Thomas Braddock says of New York City, as he and his family escape north from there in the summer of 1889, bound for a much-needed vacation in the Adirondack Mountains. But, as Braddock quickly discovers in Richard E. Crabbe's second historical thriller, The Empire of Shadows, there's nothing particularly healthy about the dark-forested expanses of upstate New York, either--not when they become the hiding place of a young Mohawk fugitive named Jim Tupper.
After knifing a Manhattan construction foreman in self defense, Tupper, shepherded by the sagacious spirit of his grandfather, strives to vanish into the Adirondack wilderness of his Indian ancestors. He doesn't reckon, though, on being pursued by such a tenacious manhunter as Braddock. The Gotham cop takes a personal interest in the Tupper affair after the gruesome slaying of Lettie Burman, a maid at a luxurious Adirondacks resort who'd recently embraced Braddock's adopted teenage son, Mike, as her lover. With suspicion for this crime falling squarely on Mike, a former street gang member, Braddock seeks to clear the boy by finding the real killer. His hope for Mike's exoneration rests on a piece of plaid fabric and the murder weapon, a modified bayonet similar to one Tupper had acquired in New York. Yet even as Braddock, Mike, and a legendary Abanaki Indian guide follow a bloody backwoods trail, forces both rapacious and homicidal array to silence them--at any cost. Crabbe's absorbing debut novel, Suspension, followed Braddock's chase after a cabal of Confederate soldiers bent on destroying the Brooklyn Bridge. Much of its appeal lay in the author's colorfully detailed re-creation of 1883 Manhattan. The action in The Empire of Shadows is somewhat harder to follow, as it spins through a ruggedly exquisite terrain that's terra incognito to most readers. And this tale includes episodes that seem more shocking than likely, such as one involving an unexpectedly vicious elevator operator. Still, Crabbe shows a patient skill in expanding the characters of Braddock and Mike, and he maintains a high level of mystery and malevolence until the book's closing pages. If it's not quite a 19th-century Deliverance, The Empire of Shadows is also no peaceful walk in the woods. --J. Kingston Pierce
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