Review: "Photograph" by Brian Freeman

 

Photograph by Brian Freeman Blackstone, 2025     In Brian Freeman’s excellent psychological thriller, Photograph—which is due in bookstores Oct. 7th—a Daytona, Florida, private eye, Shannon Wells, is hired for a peculiar job. A worried, middle-aged accountant named Faith Selby, asks Shannon to “[j]ust find out who I am…. That’s all I need to know.” Shannon takes the request at face value and while she finds evidence Faith Selby started life as someone else, she is unable to identify who exactly that someone else was. And it appears this conclusion is exactly what Faith was hoping for. Almost a year later Shannon finds another Selby—Faith’s daughter, Kate—sitting across from her “office” table at a seaside tiki bar inquiring why Shannon had been hired by Kate’s mother. Shannon balks at the request until Kate reveals Faith has been murdered. Kate believes the murder is related to a photograph Faith took of a young girl standing next to a vending machine, her back to the camera, in the parking lot of a roadside motel. The photograph was taken 26-years earlier and it appeared, without Faith’s consent, in a recent coffee table book called Millenium Memories. Shannon agrees to help Kate find Faith’s killer and, using the photograph as her only real clue, she follows a trail of violence and menace to smalltown Michigan where she learns the photograph may be related to an unsolved murder from 1999. Photograph is an atmospheric and wickedly plotted thriller with a touch of the supernatural—Shannon is haunted by nightmares of a woman being murdered in what may be a flashback to her own murder in a past life. The action is lively: there are gunfights, tightly ratcheted tension, and surprise after twisty surprise. While the concept is big and (some might say) over-the-top, Freeman’s clever plotting, his attention to detail, and his likable heroine smooth Photograph into a nail-biting, exciting, and caffeinated literary treat. It should appeal to readers of psychological thrillers, suspense, and mainstream thrillers in equal doses.

Check out Photograph on Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the hardcover.