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WHITE SHADOW is a very different work for Ace Atkins, who has garnered critical and popular acclaim with his Nick Travers novels, a very readable series featuring a protagonist who is by turns a music professor and a somewhat reluctant private eye. What we have here is a more serious, much darker worldview.
It is a fictionalized account of the infamous and unsolved Charlie Wall murder, which occurred in Tampa, Florida in 1955. Wall, a one-time criminal kingpin specializing in the areas of bootlegging and illegal gambling, was found bludgeoned to death in his home, putting the city in an uproar and causing the ethically challenged police department to shift into overdrive to determine who was behind the deed. There was a surfeit of suspects, given that Wall had made a number of enemies, particularly among the Cuban and Sicilian gangsters who maintained a de facto control of the streets of Tampa while warily vying with and eying each other.
The narrative of the crime and its subsequent investigation are presented from different points of view. The primary of these are L.B. Turner, a reporter for The Tampa Daily Times, and Ed Dodge, a tough city detective who clings to ethics and truth in a sea full of sharks. There are others, however, including a beautiful young woman with a quiet, smoldering passion for revenge, and criminals who have various reasons for rejoicing in Wall's death, even as they work at cross-purposes. For even as Wall's murder is investigated, it has repercussions that quietly but surely affected events on an international scale --- even to this day --- among people and within places that did not even know of Charlie Wall's flamboyant existence and brutal end.
The foregoing elements, taken together, would be enough to make WHITE SHADOW a compelling read. Atkins, however, does much more here. The research that was involved in its writing is remarkable, as is its result, which is the literary recreation of a time and place removed from the present by a half-century. Atkins recreates the imagery and rhythm of Tampa in 1955 so unerringly that, at times while I was reading this work, the world outside of its pages looked foreign by comparison. Atkins's characterizations are all memorable and jolting; switching points of view continuously throughout the book, Atkins unerringly bestows each character with their own voice, so much so that one narrative smoothly follows another without the confusion that a lesser writer might otherwise impart on a reader.
That said, the primary element of WHITE SHADOW that ultimately lifts it to the summit of fictional works is its imagery. Atkins evokes the spirit of such varied figures as E. L. Doctorow (without, thankfully, sacrificing imagery for clarity), Cormac McCarthy, Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy. Violence is sudden and sure; there are double-crosses from beginning to end; and there is romance, or what passes for it.
A note on the latter: there are many types of love affairs that take place here, and it is with this element that Atkins infuses his greatest irony in its most subtle sense. For it is between the least likely of couples that the most --- and only --- successful relationship in WHITE SHADOW occurs. You'll know it when you read it.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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