Alex North knows how to write a book! The Shadows kept me wanting more. I love books that are hard to pause and come back later to. I definitely was not disappointed and I reccomend this book to everyone who loves chilling reads.

The Shadows was my second experience with an audiobook. The premise of the book sounded intriguing. I also found the book cover impressive. It showed a bony hand with the spaces between the fingers appearing to be shadows.

The book starts with the Prologue, when the first-person narrator, Paul Adams, was just a 15-year-old schoolboy. It was the time when an unspeakable tragedy took place, a crime that a classmate, Charlie Crabtree, was responsible for. Back then, Paul’s mother, Daphne, stood firmly on his side. Soon after the crime, Paul left their village to pursue higher studies.

Back in the past, the closure of their local school had forced Paul and his best friend, James Dawson, to join a school in the next town. There they were befriended by Charlie and his sidekick, Billy Roberts. But while Paul refused to be enamoured with Charlie’s mysterious behaviour and his suggestions regarding lucid dreaming and the power to make one’s dreams real, James was completely taken in.

Charlie’s idea of lucid dreaming suggested that he had the ability to take control of his dreams to commit any crime for the sake of pleasing a shadowy master.

This is how the authorial voice describes dreams: Our subconscious takes everyday experiences and shatters them on the floor like a vase, then picks up a handful of pieces to form something random and new to show us while we sleep. We might recognise a few fragments by they’re joined together oddly and separated by strange cracks. Dreams are a patchwork stitched together from the things that happen to us in our waking lives…Our lives can be changed by the dreams we have had.



Paul sought to dissociate himself from Charlie and from James’ hero-worship of Charlie, choosing to spend time with Jenny, a classmate who becomes his first love, but Charlie wasn’t about to let him off easily.

In the present, Detective Amanda Beck is in charge of an investigation where two teenagers have killed a classmate, stabbing him brutally. The scene of the crime is horrific, with hundreds of red palmprints covering the rocks there. The two teenage killers, soaked in blood, surrender to the police. Each is found with a knife and a diary in which they have detailed near identical accounts of how they set about killing the boy.

The awareness that this is a copycat crime leads Amanda to search the recesses of the dark net to find more information on the crime that had inspired this one. The crime where Charlie and his accomplice stabbed an innocent classmate and left tell-tale red palmprints at the scene of the crime. One of the killers, Billy, was found with a knife and his dream diary. But Charlie himself disappeared.

Subsequent searches failed to yield any clue as to his whereabouts. Billy went on to serve jailtime.

And yet there is someone on the dark net who claims to have been present at the scene of that first crime. Is it Charlie, come back to plague Paul? Or Billy who has been released? Or someone else altogether? Amanda finds someone with username @cc666 who claims to have been present at the scene of that crime, someone who claims to have Charlie’s dream diary.

For Paul, who has returned to the village after 25 years to see his mother, who is dying of dementia, it seems as if the horror is back. What’s worse, it seems his mother knows more about the crime than he thought. Will Paul know the truth before it is too late?



The chapters are written in the first person PoV of Paul, then and now, and in the third-person PoV of Amanda. The chapters flip back and forth between the two perspectives and the two timelines.

This book is the second of Amanda’s series, so we get to hear quite a bit about her background, the fact that she is the daughter of a cop and how she tries and fails to forget the horrors she has seen.



The author does a great job of creating an aura around Charlie. Though still a teenager, Charlie is like nothing that Paul and James had ever encountered before. There is a sense of danger and tension around him. The author gives us a foretaste of his malevolence the very first time we, and Paul, come across him. We become aware of the evil that he is capable of.

I’d picked up the book because the plot had intrigued me, but I wasn’t satisfied with the story or with the ending. Also, the writing was peppered with a lot of swearing, which I find annoying.



Both the voice artistes, John Heffernan and Hannah Arterton, were good. John has the added advantage of having a first-person perspective to narrate, which enabled him to put in the right inflections to suggest emotion. His voice, diction and pronunciation all helped us hear Paul’s expressions. This was an advantage that Hannah lost out on as she was narrating a third-person account. Also, her voice seemed to go a little too fast. An adjustment of the speed didn’t help.

I started listening to this and honestly I stopped because of the gore. It wasn't even that bad, but I found alarm bells ringing in my ears. So average rating, since it just wasn't for me.

This book blew me away! I was unable to but it down. Perfect, dazzlingly, very well written. The details the author described throughout the book was so amazing. The characters and storyline were fantastic. The ending I did not see coming Truly Amazing and appreciated the whole story. This is going to be a must read for many many readers. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! No spoilers. Beyond amazing I enjoyed this book so very much. The characters and storyline were fantastic. The ending I did not see coming Could not put down nor did I want to. Truly Amazing and appreciated the whole story. This is going to be a must read for many many readers. Maybe even a book club pick.

I was hesitant to read this book due to all the talk in other reviews about lucid dreams. I am not a fan of dream sequences. I often get the feeling that they are used as a tool to include information when the author doesn't have another way of doing so. Usually, I feel tricked after reading a dream sequence and I roll my eyes in annoyance. If I get to the end of a book (or movie) only to find out the whole thing was a dream, I feel like I have wasted my time with a story that didn't even happen. It's just something that I don't enjoy at all. However, this book puts the fact that lucid dreaming will be a part of it out there from the beginning and I was unbothered by it.

I don't want to say too much about the story because I don't want to give anything away, but I will say that the writing is very good. I think Alex North is really good engaging the reader and making you wonder what is going on. The pacing is good and at no point was I bored or not caring what would happen. Due to this, the story went by quickly.

There were a few surprises in the story that I did not expect and also a couple of possibilities that I was glad the author steered clear of. Some of the story was more believable than other parts, but overall I thought it was an interesting story and I really enjoyed it.

This is the second book I have read by North. I decided to read this book after reading The Whisper Man recently. I loved that book and will continue to look for more of his work in the future. I look forward to seeing what he comes up with next.

I listened to the audio of this book, narrated by Hannah Arterton and John Heffernan. I thought they both did an excellent job and I would recommend the audio if this is a genre you enjoy listening to.

This story is like an urban legend; part true, part supernatural belief to explain a mystery.

What happened to Charlie Crabtree? 25 years ago he committed a murder and disappeared in the part of the woods known as The Shadows. The unsolved missing persons case created a cult following and copy cats of Charlie's ritual sacrifice believed to have given him passage to another dimension.

Paul never liked Charlie, knew he would be trouble from the beginning. After the death of his friend, Paul moved away for school and never looked back. Now his mom is terminally sick and this will be the last time he can see her before she dies. Revisiting his childhood home, Paul remembers the events leading up to his friend's murder. Someone or something is sending him a message about that fateful time.

Amanda Beck knows who committed the most recent murder of a teenage victim, what she's trying to figure out is why. Who or what is Red Hand? Why are kids going online talking about lucid dreams and what does that have to do with killing a friend? Amanda needs to figure this out to prevent others from trying to ritually go to the Shadows.

I read The Whisper Man a couple of months ago and LOVED IT so I had high hopes for this book but it just didn't have the same impact. The nods to that story are nice though.

The whole story flirts with paranormal ideas. Is there a logical explanation for Charlie's disappearance? For the weird messages Paul is noticing in his mother's house 25 years later? Or is there a boogeyman out there luring kids to the dark side? Is there a world in The Shadows that can only be accessed through blood sacrifice?

I didn't love the ending. It just didn't have the impact I was hoping for and completely zapped the haunting creepiness I was expecting to be left with. I like The Whisper Man by this author or The Missing Season by Gillian French or Stephen King The Outsider better. The are similar type stories.

I did enjoy listening to the narrator. He held my attention even if parts of the story did not.

Requested from Netgalley. I received a copy of this novel from the publisher. All opinions are my own, any review is voluntary.

I love Alex North’s writing. I was completely riveted listening to The Shadows, just like I was with his first book, but I can understand the mixed reviews I’ve read.

This book follows Paul Adams coming back to his hometown to visit his dying mother. He’s still riddled with guilt about his role in events from his childhood when he and his best friend became friends with Charlie Crabtree—a decision that ultimately left someone dead in such a horrendous murder that the case became infamous, bolstered by the fact that Charlie mysteriously disappeared after. Now Detective Amanda Beck is working a copy cat case that leads her to a message board where someone with the user name CC (and some number I don’t remember) seems to be pulling the strings. Told in alternating POVs, it’s not until their paths overlap that both Paul and Amanda begin to unravel the pieces of the mystery that reveal what happened that day years ago and who’s behind the new killings.

The Shadows has many interesting themes. Lucid dreaming, first love, long-buried town secrets, family dysfunction and the roles we each try to play, and the way urban legends can grow legs of their own. The audio for this book was fantastic. I honestly couldn’t stop listening. I had to know what was going to happen to next. A great feeling when reading a thriller. The problem came when those answers weren’t all that satisfying. Some of the twists felt like tricks and others felt like they came out of left field.

This is a problem I have with thrillers. What matters more—the journey or the destination? If I loved the process of reading, shouldn’t that count for a lot? 95% of my experience with this book was positive. But if the point of a story is to lead us to a destination and you end up somewhere you don’t want to be with no ride home, it’s hard to remember the trip fondly.

I would definitely recommend The Shadows (and whole-heartedly recommend the audio version) for the atmosphere and writing craft but if you’re all about the puzzle adding up, you might want to skip this one.
Are you a journey reader or a destination reader?

Thank you to @netgalley and @macmillan.audio for an ALC copy in exchange for my honest opinion.

This was almost as good a The Whisper Man. And I liked the audiobook. It made the story come to life. The characters were like able and relatable and the story, even though there were a few twists, wasn’t hard to keep up with. It was told from two timelines and two POV, the main character and the detective investigating the crimes that had taken place over 25 years ago that brought him back home. It took me ages to figure out what his mom had to do with it all, but once that was revealed, everything else fell into place. It makes you really think about the lengths you would go to to protect the ones you love.

I enjoyed this book for its creepiness and atmospheric writing. The audio had a lot of issues so that really annoyed me, but yeah, it was an okay read. The anti-climatic ending and a whole lot of loose threads made me very disappointed though.

I enjoyed this one although it wasn’t my favorite on audio. I think I may have enjoyed it more had I read it instead of listened to it.

Thank you NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to listen to the audio version of this book. I enjoyed the narrator of the story. I was very disappointed in this book. It was so hyped and there were mixed reviews on his first book. This was my first book by him. I have not read the Whisper Man. I just felt no connection to the characters and I was not invested in the story like I usually am with a thriller/murder mystery. I was hoping for more creep factor given from the synopsis it was supposed to be a play off of Bloody Mary in the mirror. It just fell flat for me and I could not wait to get it over with.

Thank you to Netgalley and McMillian Audio for the change to listen and review this audiobook.

The narrator was good but I like to be able to listen to my audiobooks on 2-3x speed and I found that if I turned it to anything quicker than 2x speed it would skip and jump.

As for the story:

I liked the concept and it had a great atmosphere that did give me the spook factor. There was a good twist at the end that I didn't guess and it was fun to dive back into a creepy story in the world of the whisper man.

I did however not enjoy it as much as the whisper man. I found myself not as invested in the storyline/characters. Im not sure if this was because of the time jump and Multiple POV pacing that it got a little lost sometimes.

This would be the kind of book I would want to reread now I know what happens to pick up on all the little things I missed. I will continue to read books from Alex North and I think his books have a Stephen King vibe to them in how twisted they are. You need to be in the right mood to jump into this one.

I had such high hopes for this book! This is the first book I have read by Alex North and had heard such great things. I really enjoyed his writing style and I thought the premise was a good one. It was a bizarre tale of a ritualistic murder among friends and one, Charlie Crabtree, who was obsessed with lucid dreams simply vanishes in the woods and is never found. Paul Adams learns that there is a copycat and all the memories of 25 years ago come flooding back.

What I really struggled with was the slow pace and I got really bored really quick. I almost put it down a few times, but I am glad I stuck it out. I did enjoy the ending of the book. This book had all the elements I typically enjoy in a book! It was mysterious and creepy.

It will not deter me from reading The Whisper Man either!

Thank you to Macmillan Audio for my gifted copy of this book!

I work with 3rd to 5th graders so I don’t think it would be a good one for them.

As for the book! I will be recommending this to my friends and my book review followers. This is the kind of book that you might want to read every Halloween. The creepy, chilly vibe in this book is strong! I on several occasions I got goose bumps and loved every minute of it.

Absolutely love Alex North! His first novel, the Whisper Man, was one of two books I gave 5 stars to last year. I’m so grateful to have listened to The Shadows!

This novel was wonderfully written, with great twists and connecting plot lines. I’d expect nothing less. Give it a read, absolutely!

Scary is an understatement. One of these books you cannot forget. I had to stop a few times just to catch my breath. Listened to it only during the day. This book was nothing I was expecting (in a good way). You can feel the fear and the pain. Enjoyed the audiobook version a lot. I cannot recommend it enough.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to read this book. I'll be posting my review on Goodreads and Amazon

This book is incredibly creepy but it's also very fun. It had me questioning everything I knew all the way up to the final chapters. It felt similar to The Chalk Man as the main character grew up in a small town where everyone knows everyone and the plot is based around 'could there be a ghost here?' feeling.

The plot worked really well and was paced brilliantly. It switches between Paul's POV and Detective Beck's. When the book is focused on Paul, it also switches between present tense and 25 years ago. This was really easy to follow and was needed to explain the details of the plot. However, for me the end fell a bit flat which is why it wasn't 5*s for me. I haven't read The Whisper Man but after this one I'll definitely be picking it up.

I found this story very hard to listen to. I couldn't follow along with all of the characters and I couldn't connect with any of them, I was a bit let down in regards to the story line and i had high hopes for this one compared to The Whisper man.

"Perhaps life was just a matter of doing what you thought was best at the time and then living with the consequences as best you could afterward."

People often ask me how I maintain my lofty goal of reading at least one book each week. The answer is pretty simple actually. I read whenever I can. In the past five years or so, audiobooks have become an integral part of meeting that weekly quota. Before the outbreak of COVID-19 forced me to work from home, I would listen to books as part of my daily commute to work. Working from home has seen me be a little more creative about my listening. Now I'll crank on a book as I cook, clean, or walk the dog. Pretty much anytime I have the chance to listen, I try to pop in my headphones and give it a go. Naturally, I was very excited when NetGalley (the website I receive many advanced copies of books from) introduced audiobooks to review. I quickly snagged a copy of Alex North's followup to his fantastic debut, The Whisper Man, and settled in for the creepy suspense of The Shadows.

It has been twenty-five years since Paul was in his home town of Gritton Wood. All this time later, the horrific events from that time still haunt his dreams. Paul fell into a friend group with Charlie Crabtree. Crabtree used his darkly magnetic personality to influence his peers. The kids were drawn to Crabtree's mystical control of his dreams, seemingly not only connected to his own mind but the dreams of others too. Like the other boys, Paul was entranced by the possibilities that Crabtree presented. He stood in awe of the potential of inhabiting different dreamscapes. When Crabtree's sinister intentions were revealed, Paul left the group, but the other boys were already too invested in the magic of the dream world. Shortly after Paul parted ways, Crabtree convinced one of the boys to gruesomely murder the other. The murderer was arrested, but Crabtree disappeared, never to be seen again.

Paul's reluctant return is motivated by his mother's late-stage dementia. The pair have stayed in touch, but this is the first time they have faced each other in the last two decades. Mental decay aside, she has been doing okay physically. A recent fall changed all of that. As Paul visits her bedside, his mother's physical frailty finally matching that of her mind, she begins to speak to him. She's not making much sense, but her words are filling Paul with unease. These words coupled with an ominous discovery in her attic leave him reeling with a dread he hasn't felt since those interactions with Crabtree.

Coupled with the story of Paul is that of Amanda Beck, a hot-shot young detective from the nearby town of Featherbank (fans of North's other novel The Whisper Man will know this town well). Amanda is investigating a string of murders that are eerily familiar to the crimes that Charlie Crabtree inspired. As she investigates these apparent copy cat crimes, she begins to fear that Crabtree may not have vanished after all. Paul is the only person left who is familiar with Crabtree's rationale, so Amanda turns to him. As the book proceeds, the line between imagination and reality is blurred, making the events ahead all the more dangerous.

The Shadows sees author Alex North follow up his massively successful debut with another novel that plays on both the horror and suspense genres. All the elements that made The Whisper Man a success are here too. There's the prodigal son figure returning home after years away. There a creepy legend that haunts the town because it might actually be true. There's a detective investigating crimes that are strangely reminiscent of crimes that happened in the past. Still, there's something about this new book that just didn't move me in the same way that the other one did. Both John Heffernan Hannah Arterton, who narrated the audiobook, did an excellent job of bringing the characters to life (even at a 1.75x speed), but something about the story itself rang a bit hollow to me. The Inception-like idea of entering dreams is intriguing enough, providing a level of the supernatural that wasn't as prominent in North's previous effort. For some reason, I just couldn't engage with this story in the way that I wanted to. Perhaps the plot and structure were just all a bit too familiar for me. Whatever the case may be. Everything about The Shadows is perfectly fine as a serviceable thriller. After the stellar debut of The Whisper Man, this one just left me wanting something more.