The Hidden Man

by: Anthony Flacco

Published by: Ballantine Books

Reviewed by Maria Elmvang

Every day we pass hundreds of people on our way through life. Some we notice and remember, but most we just pass by, forgetting them the second they disappear from our line of sight. The Hidden Man knows this, and takes advantage of being as non-descript as possible.

Famous mesmerizer James “JD” Duncan knows the dangers of these non-descript people, and hires homicide detective Randall Blackburn to act as his personal bodyguard as he settles to spend 10 months in San Francisco during the World Fair of 1919. Detective Blackburn is confused. Why hire a detective to do a job that requires more brawl than brain? And why is JD in a state of panic over an attack or assassination attempt that he can’t–or won’t–tell the detective anything about?

Meanwhile Detective Randall Blackburn has problems of his own. In the nine years that have passed since The Last Nightingale, his two adopted children have grown up and now Randall wonders if as a single father he gave especially his strong-minded daughter the direction she needed. It doesn’t help that she shows an instinctive dislike for his fiancée, whom he was otherwise counting on helping on giving his daughter the motherly advice he himself couldn’t.

Revealing any more of the plot would be a shame, as Anthony Flacco has a definite talent for spinning yarns and keeping his readers interested in the characters and universe he unfolds before them. His descriptions of Randall Blackburn and his two children were intriguing and made the characters worth of further investigation.

He would, however, have benefitted from a more critical editor, as the sentences would sometimes get knotted up in themselves and require several read-throughs to untangle, and the pacing of the novel varied wildly–rushed in some places and dragging in others. Especially the three-page, very detailed description of somebody burning to death was unnecessarily drawn out. As it was the only graphical scene in the book, it could easily have been shortened or removed altogether to accommodate the more squeamish of Flacco’s readers.

Despite this The Hidden Man is still worth being picked up by anybody interested in historical suspense, and while it is the second book in a series, one can easily read it without having read The Last Nightingale.

Armchair Interviews says: Another good story that could have been helped with more thorough editing.