Land of Careful Shadows

By: Suzanne Chazin

Narrated by: Armando Durán

Length: 11 hrs and 11 mins

Publisher's summary

Land of Careful Shadows by award-winning author Suzanne Chazin is a powerful mystery full of passion and secrets that deals with a clash of cultures and familial relationships, and it's full of drama, mystery, and raw emotions.

When the dead body of a Latino woman is found in a reservoir about 50 miles north of Manhattan, with a photo of a baby in her purse nearby, the police try to determine who the child is and if it is still alive. Along with the photo, they also find a disturbing note in the purse: "Go back to your country. You don't belong here."

Homicide detective Jimmy Vega is Latino too, so he knows how hard it can be for an outsider to fit into a close-knit town like Lake Holly. Vega is a highly respected officer of the law, and he is challenged and intrigued by Adele Figueroa, a passionate defender of immigrants' rights. Vega must rethink everything he believes in order to uncover the truths about his town, his family, and himself.

Land of Careful Shadows is a tour de force of literary suspense and an intimate journey into the human heart.

©2014 Suzanne Chazin (P)2014 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Great attempt at humanizing suffering.

This was a great story - though it depended on coincidence a little too much. What I liked about the story most of all was the way the author was able to bring us into the tragic experiences of undocumented persons living in the United States. The humanization of their suffering, trauma and experiences made me really identify with this marginalized group. What’s especially good is that the author was able to do this without being too preachy, too on the nose or too soap-boxish. The story, ultimately, is less of a mystery/thriller or police procedural and more a story of human relationships set against the tensions surrounding migration in the US. I strongly recommend it for anyone who likes a slow boil story, in which the ending is not as clean or as simple as many cookie cutter novels are. Give it a try.

DL

entertaining story

I enjoyed it. It was credible and had a good story line. I recommend it.

Land of Careful Shadows

What a magnificent story. It provided me with some insight into an immigrants trials and tribulations in this North America. Decisions are always difficult, making the correct ones may not bring success, but to take heart in the present gives us hope. I love the story

Narrator was great, story not so much

I expected a murder story, but that's only a small part of the book. I didn't care for the storyline. I listened to half the book because of the narrator.

Spellbinding

Insite of how immigrants are treated. Hope we are doing better now. good listen. H open

Couldn't put it down

Loved it. Kept you wondering who the guilty party was. A father's love for his daughter and police love for his job.

Tough

Sort of ho hum.
I had to re-read each chapter to remind me of what
The plot was not strong enough to hold my interest.

Just could not finish this.

This book just plods along. Finally just quit. I think most people want the author to paint a picture but the atmospherics makes this novel seen unending.

Too many storylines

The book tries to hard to fit in too many stories. There are multiple subplots that could have just been left out entirely. This has nothing to do with length. In fact, I prefer long stories. It's just that it turned into a bit of a soap opera.
The narration is good and the setting is quite intriguing. It is an easy listen.

Much More Than a Mystery

Wow! What a great book! There is certainly a compelling and suspenseful mystery driving the plot here, and--barring one or two mildly implausible coincidences-- plot twists both shocking and utterly fitting, revelations clicking into place as the crime(s) is/are solved. But beyond all that is a compelling literary novel with a raft of full-fledged characters in all their complexities of admirable and reprehensible traits negotiating the moral dilemmas inherent in the immigration problem. Mystery novels don't often bring me to tears: this one did three or four times. This is a deeply humane rendering of what seems an intractable problem of our time, showing, as it does, both what law enforcement and undocumented immigrants are up against.

Pay no attention to the mean-spirited negative reviews falsely accusing the author of stereotyping both the immigrants and the police (and note that the reviews making that claim were written before their authors even bothered reading past the beginning of the book). The performance is top notch, too. Armando Durán's voice and delivery remind me of the venerable George Guidall, elder statesmen of audio book readers and familiar to all of us who love audiobooks.