WALKING THE SHADOWS

Donald James

Century £9.99 tbo/£18.99hbk

Reviewed by Bob Cartwright

I loved Donald James’ Vadim Trilogy (Monstrum, The Fortune Teller, and Vadim – all Century), and hoped that he might be willing to extend that trilogy to a quartet. Sadly, no such luck. Instead enter Tom Chapel, a middle-aged philanderer from rich American stock, who thus far has wasted his life doing this and that, frequently with his sister, between carving out a limited reputation as a writer.

Chapel’s life undergoes a dramatic volte-face when he and his aristocratic harridan of a mother are on a plane returning to San Francisco. They and the other passengers are expecting to make quite an impact on the city on the bay, because the plane’s undercarriage has failed to engage. Just the time for Mumsy to announce that Sonny is not, as he has believed all this life, the son of General J Dwight Chapel, late of the US army. Nasty to the core, Mumsy refuses to disclose just who is Tommy’s father. Bored stiff, yet? Well go and make a cup of tea. It does get better, though not much.

Not surprisingly, Tom Chapel embarks on something of a quest for the identity of his true father. A search with reaches its peak when he is urgently summoned to France by his ex-wife, Elaine. Their 17 year old daughter, Romilly, had mysteriously disappeared, only to be found later in the middle of a rural French road in a coma. After a bit she emerges from the coma, still unable to remember anything about the period of her abduction, or who had abducted her.

It’s not the first time a young girl has been abducted in the area. Not too long before, another young girl was found dead. Suspicion falls on a man who has been seen in the area from time to time, posing as a priest, maybe even a priest. But Tom has another possible explanation for the attack on Romilly. Just before flying to France, a legal firm representing an unknown French party, has informed him that his daughter has inherited a fortune, including the French chateau which, until his death, had been the home of Elaine’s employer, the movie mogul Marcel Coultard. No one seems to know why Marcel chose to leave his fortune to Romilly, but the decision is certainly not popular with either his daughter Claire or his son, Sebastien, nasty and vicious piece of no good who runs night clubs and has jackbooted his way to preeminence in the National Front. So has Sebastien schemed to have Romilly killed before she could claim his father’s fortune. Or is there yet another explanation which lies in Marcel’s role in the Resistance during the Second World War?

Well I would like to say I still cared about the answers, when all is finally revealed. The truth is I felt somewhat jaded by the whole tortuous story, and wished even more that Donald James had instead given us another Vadim story. Maybe next time.