I've never read a James Patterson novel before. But when I saw he'd done a pastiche with The Shadow I was intrigued. The Shadow is a strange novel and not what I expected. The story begins in 1937 when Lamont Cranston and Margo Lane are dining out at a swanky restaurant and find themselves poisoned by Shiwan Khan. Cranston scoops up Margo's limp body and races to a destination in NYC which he hopes will save both of them. Cut to 2089 and a young woman named Maddie Gomes who has just turned eighteen and so has come into her inheritance. Turns out that inheritance is found in a remote warehouse and is in fact the cryogenically preserved form of Lamont Cranston. With his revival the story really kicks off.
The novel is set in a grim future in which populations have exploded and resources have made the disparity between the haves and have-nots extreme, so much so that most people schlep around a grungy dirty city with little or no access to water clean or otherwise and food is scarce. So scarce that the promise of food makes people cast off their cautions and so fall prey to all kinds of insidious experiments. The world is ruled by a single man, a man who lives in a resplendent mansion and who just might be an old enemy of the Shadow.
The novel reads swiftly with tiny chapters that cause the reader to race along. The perspective changes from time to time, but mostly we have a straightforward science fiction adventure yarn that pits our hero the Shadow and his young ally against the oppressive martial forces of the enemy. This is not the Shadow of the pulps or the radio exactly, but it's suggested is the man who those pop culture entertainments are based upon. I admit that bugged me a little. This Shadow can turn invisible (sort of) and later develops other powers. Other characters have powers such as telepathic control of other people.
If you're a Shadow completist this 2022 novel might be fun, or it might be annoying. I can only give The Shadow a moderate recommendation.
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