“A Shadow Falls,” But This Detective Doesn’t Let Blindness Stop Her

A Shadow Falls by Andreas Pflüger

Member of an elite team that tracks Germany’s most dangerous criminals, she is astride team member Leon Keyes, fully dressed, in a hotel suite, about to have sex.  Suddenly, they are attacked by several men.

For Jenny, no problem.

Catapulting herself straight up, Jenny breaks one man’s jaw with a rotating kick, thrusts her middle finger into his carotid artery, unhinges his wrist joint, grabs her Walther P99 and shoots him in the forehead so “half his head sprays onto the wall.”  Then, in the next few seconds, she shoots and kills a second man and, as “his bared teeth are blasted away,” a third.

As Jenny gets shot, runs from the suite and runs out of bullets, you can repeat a similar fate for men numbers four through nine…..until eventually, man number five reappears, shoots Jenny in the shoulder, and then, as she lies on the floor, his “boot hits her temple full force.” Her world goes black.

That’s what happened to Jenny Aaron ten years ago in Rome — action recounted in the opening pages of the Jenny Aaron thriller A Shadow Falls by Andreas Pflüger, being released in the U.S. by Dover Publications.

Five years ago, in Barcelona, in the previous Jenny Aaron thriller, In the Dark, instead of taking a boot to the head, she takes a bullet that leaves her irreversibly blind.

Now, in A Shadow Falls, in her world of darkness, she has been acquiring new skills. She recently tested them against Ludger Holm, the psychopath who fired the shot that blinded her.

But now Holm is dead (or is he?) and has left her $2 billion (but why?).

Jenny knows it’s a trap, but she also knows if she is ever to find peace she must play Holm’s game to the bitter end.  Play it and exact vengeance on this man who is her nemesis.

And she does have new skills, skills to play the game well.

Studies confirm when one loses the ability to see, other senses become heightened.  And now Jenny Aaron can assess an approaching motorcycle, footsteps and fragrance in ways that make her a marvelous specimen of a crime fighter – and make her awareness of the world around her increase the reader’s own sense of hearing, smell and taste.

She can’t do everything described in the opening pages of A Shadow Falls – killing seven men in one flurry of action – but she can do a lot.  And if you’re lucky enough to start with extraordinary, already fine-tuned abilities, you can just about fool people into thinking you are sighted.  And also use that to your advantage.

Jenny Aaron does.  And with her skills and thirst for vengeance, she – and this thriller – hurtle at breakneck speed toward a very satisfying conclusion.

Author Andreas Pflüger knows the world of crime and the elite units that fight it.  He’s written several episodes of German TV’s longest-running police shows.  And he knows how to make that world – and the world we all live in – vivid.

The very first words of A Shadow Falls are “Happiness makes us blind / But pain enables us to see” – and the reader, sharing Jenny’s pain and plunged into her darkened vision, gains a richer sense of the world.  And emerges, with her, seeing the truth.

The truth is not always what it seems.  Even a blind woman can see that.

A Shadow Falls is available for purchase.