Chasing Shadows by Robert Bryndza

Chasing Shadows is the ninth, and most recent, DCI Erika Foster thriller by Robert Bryndza, published in 2025. I’ve been reading the Erika Foster series for many years and they are always page turners. It is also the second of six books I’ve bought from Vinted recently. The first one I read was The Other Miss Jones by Sophie Flynn.

A collapsed ceiling reveals a dead body – and a flat scrubbed clean apart from a thin layer of cocaine on the ceiling. The drug dogs lead Erika and the team to a parcel locker outside the building. When she tracks down the parcel locker’s owner, Erika finds herself face to face with Jerome Goodman – the man who murdered her husband and several colleagues 10 years earlier.

Erika arrests him on the spot. But his ID says he’s Kieron Bagshaw and she is forced to release him.

Her bosses fear Erika hasn’t got over her trauma and force her to take leave. So she uses the time to find out more about Kieron Bagshaw and Jerome Goodman, and returns to the place where her husband was gunned down all those years ago.

Slowly the pieces start to come together and Erika builds up a picture of what really happened on that day. But can she really trust her colleagues? And will she ever be allowed back to work?

Chasing Shadows is another page turner from Robert Bryndza. It’s been a while since I read one of his books, but I felt this was perhaps the most complex and mult-layered case to date.

If you enjoy a fast-moving police procedural type thriller, I would recommend the Erika Foster series. It’s not necessary to start at the beginning of the series and you can read Chasing Shadows or any of the other books as a standalone novel.

One small quibble I have with Robert Bryndza books is they tend to have a higher number of typos than other books. This one made several references to ‘electricity metres’ instead of meters. There were also mentions of ‘Altringham’ police station, which is how it is pronounced, but it is actually Altrincham. Why is nobody noticing and editing these basic errors? Even me writing them incorrectly in this blog is being picked up by WordPress!

Disappointingly, and completely unrelated to the content of the book, this book from Vinted was a bit sticky and smelly, which is the first time I’ve experienced that with a secondhand book. I actually washed my hands every time I took a break from reading it!