You won’t be able to stop reading “Among the Shadows”

Among the Shadows by Bruce Robert Coffin

Bruce Robert Coffin’s novel, Among the Shadows, is the only thing that went right on our recent flights to Italy. I’d dipped into the book the night before we left, to make sure it was worthy of carrying all the way to Italy and back. And it was.

So I started reading it on the bus trip from Portland to Boston, read a bit more at Logan and on the plane to Rome, and finished the book during a 7 hour layover in Rome. We’d left Boston late, missed our connection in Rome to Pisa, waited 7 hours for another flight to Pisa, and arrived too late to get to our destination that night. And oh yea, our luggage didn’t arrive in Pisa with us.

Coffin could probably write a novel about that trip! The good news is that his novel is really good, as was the rest of our visit to Italy.

Without giving away too much of the intriguing plot, the story is about a police officer who stumbles onto the trail of a bunch of corrupt policemen, one of whom might have been his father, who committed suicide. One of those corrupt policemen or someone they abused, is killing them, one at a time.

Coffin is a retired detective who supervised all homicide and violent crime investigations for the Portland police department. After the terrorist attacks on September 11, he worked for four years for the FBI, on counterterrorism. So he knows of what he writes.

He is currently writing a sequel to Among the Shadows, and I can’t wait!

George Smith

About George Smith

George stepped down at the end of 2010 after 18 years as the executive director of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine to write full time. He writes a weekly editorial page column in the Kennebec Journal and Waterville Morning Sentinel, a weekly travel column in those same newspapers (with his wife Linda), monthly columns in The Maine Sportsman magazine, two outdoor news blogs (one on his website, georgesmithmaine.com, and one on the website of the Bangor Daily News), and special columns for many publications and newsletters. Islandport Press published a book of George's favorite columns, "A Life Lived Outdoors" in 2014. In 2014, George also won a Maine Press Association award for writing the state's bet sports blog. In 2016, Down East Books published George's book, Maine Sporting Camps, and Islandport Press published George and his wife Linda's travel book, Take It From ME, about their favorite Maine inns and restaurants.