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Title: The Crime Cult
Series: The Shadow #12
Authors: Maxwell Grant
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Crime Fiction
Pages: 156
Words: 50K
The Shadow goes up against a devotee of the Thuggee sect, which is devoted to the death goddess Kali. If you’ve ever seen Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, you’ll get a decent picture of the Thuggee cult. But they’re are also practitioners of the art of death by strangulation. So every victim in this story was strangled to death.
I’ve read another short story about Thuggees, either in an Alfred Hitchcock Collection or one of the Roald Dahl adult books, but I can’t be bothered to track down one specific short story. Anyway, that story also dealt with the strangulation side of the Cult, so that wasn’t a revelation here.
The more I read of these Shadow stories, the more I can why everyone says Batman was born of the Shadow. This time I noticed just how afraid the thugs, criminals and gangsters are of the Shadow and how he not only uses that fear, but encourages it. They SHOULD fear him. It reminds me of how Batman started. He wanted something to scare the badguys, to put the fear of God into their hearts and he would out-think them but also out-fight them. The Shadow had his time, and I enjoy reading these novels, but I don’t see him ever making a comeback. I mean, Batman is on the skids after all these years due to really bad story telling and the authors and artists relying on the fans buying crap just because of nostalgia and past associations. The era of Batman is coming to a close too I think.
When I wrote about Foundation and Empire last month, I mentioned how the length of it worked for me. These Shadow novels are built along the same lines and I just love it. It’s enough to entertain me without bogging me down. There are times when I’m reading a book and if I realize it’s over 300 pages I kind of groan to myself because I know the author is going to fill in all the background when I just wanted a two paragraph description of the whole world. Even better, one paragraph would suit me just fine! But instead of whining about that, I realize I have that need for brevity and these Shadow books are filling that need perfectly.
While this is the first book I am reviewing in 2024, it was not the first I read. I read a very mediocre book and just couldn’t face up to writing a review for a completely boring and mediocre book as my first review of the year. So I decided to read a good book and review it first. That’s the beauty of scheduling posts a week or so ahead of schedule, I can do things like that. I am glad to be reviewing a Shadow book first thing. It’s brief, exciting and filled with bad, gun toting thugs, decent upstanding men in the Shadow’s employ and a main character who totes two automatic pistols and isn’t afraid to use them.
★★★✬☆
From the Publisher
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The marks of death were upon them. A mysterious round burn no bigger than a dime scarred each forehead; upon each throat was a thin, almost invisible white line. The police were baffled, but each of the victims knew that his time was up and his page in the book of death had come due. It was obviously a case for The Shadow but the most famous crimefighter of all was missing!
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