Broken Shadows

Broken Shadows by Tarek Refaat
Published by Red Sands Publishing on April 8th 2016
Genres: Thriller, Action Thriller
Pages: 176
Format: eBook, Kindle Book
Source: Amazon Kindle

Broken hearts and dark shadows, will love ever find its way back to them? Fifteen years ago, Heidi Aasar fled the country, hoping to make sense of the chaos that surrounded her. A burned ex-operative, she refuses to continue hiding in the shadows. She now has the chance to right the wrongs of her dark past. Determined to find a way to redeem herself, she must first fix the loose threads she left behind so long ago. A successful business owner, Nadim Mohamed Sharaf has done his best to move on after his heart was broken fifteen years ago. In his mind, he has everything he could ever want or need at his fingertips. Until the moment Heidi makes a sudden reappearance in his life. It's then everything around him changes. A chain reaction of events soon turns Nadim and Heidi's lives upside-down. Forced to confront the turmoil brewing between them, they must put aside their differences if they are to survive another day. The choices they'll have to make will define the outcome of the lives they lead. Will they be able to overcome their painful and chaotic past? Or will the pain and heartache consume them in the long run?

What would a man do when the woman he loves is nowhere to be found?  That is the question that bugged me when I first started reading Broken Shadows by Tarek Refaat.

Nadim and Heidi are deeply in love. They have all the future to look forward to. But when Heidi suddenly leaves without notice that changes everything. However, the more perplexing thing to me was Nadim’s reaction! All what Nadim thought of was him being betrayed. He was drowned in bitterness and self-pity!! And I really thought “What man could have this reaction except a self-centered one?” I mean, what if she was in danger? What if she had been kidnapped or something?

Fifteen years later, Nadim is the successful partner in a booming IT company. He still thinks of Heidi and wonders how she could leave him that way. And just as Heidi had disappeared into thin air fifteen years ago, she’s back out of nowhere. Nadim has a job opening for the post of marketing manager at his company, and Heidi is applying for this post.

Feeling bitter and confused, Nadim interviews Heidi. All the unasked questions are still whirling in his mind. Yet he chooses not to ask, and moreover he chooses not to listen to any explanations. All he wants now for this encounter after fifteen years is to go as professional as possible. But with a sudden twist in events, all Nadim’s world is shattered and the adventure begins. Nothing is what Nadim thought it was!

This should have been a very interesting thriller if not for the handful of shortcomings. It actually had a very powerful start. The author had all the powerful elements for an excellent plot. With elements such as “the girl is nowhere to be found”, “long buried secrets”, “showing up after fifteen years”, “people are not who they say they are”, you name it… I couldn’t help thinking of many scenarios this plot could have taken. However, something went wrong. The author for some reason or the other went into a very flat plot lacking depth and complexity. The events were unconvincing with many technical inaccuracies. Moreover, he went for espionage which is a very rich genre that requires a lot of complexity. You don’t expect secret agents to be acting in very plain and simple ways and falling into naïve mistakes. When I start reading an espionage thriller, I always expect an entangled web of events and multiple threads that the author is the only one who knows when and how to pull them. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case with Broken Shadows.

The characters weren’t well developed.  I believe the author should have worked more on his characters putting more life into them so that we can see them as rea people. Nadim, the protagonist, was one of the characters I disliked most. He was always clueless popping up the most irrelevant questions all the time. I was fed up with him asking such as “What are we doing?”, “Where are we going?” all the time. I even wished someone would shoot him in the events so that I could read happily ever after without him in the plot. The most astonishing thing is that Nadim was supposed to be a tech savvy guy, being the well experienced owner of an IT company. However, he seemed clueless about the basics of communications tracking. Of course he was more obsessed with his irrelevant questions (Sad sigh!) Then we come to Heidi, smarty smart, who kept saying how smart she was without acting the least like it. The point is, this plot required much more characters with very engaging contributions to it. Real characters. People are not either black or white. There are so many shades of grey in between, and in these shades there exists the real essence of life.

I still have to give the author some credit. He is an ambitious talented writer who is always writing something. In addition to his books, he is the author of many short stories and articles. He had the talent and patience to write three book in a foreign language which is something I quite admire. If there were some linguistic or structural mistakes, they were nothing a good editor won’t fix.

I believe Tarek Refaat is an author whom we can expect a lot more from. He has the required ambition and talent to do that. I will be waiting for his next book which I hope will be much better than this one.