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Never Look Away by Linwood Barclay
Can someone please tell me why I’ve never read a Linwood Barclay book before? “Never Look Away” is a marvellous on the edge of your seat thriller that will most certainly leave you wanting more. You want More boy?!!
“Never Look Away” is a complex tale of corruption, deceit and murder. It’s obvious to me; certainly from this novel, that Barclay is a gifted thriller writer capable of weaving intelligent plots, adding a dash of lemon and then sweetening the deal with a satisfying ending.
This engrossing story doesn’t let up from the initial pages, it hooks you in from the get go, the twists and turns are endless and the characters believable. Concentration is key in a novel of this stature, the multiple sub plots are well thought out and intelligent.
On more than one occasion I wondered in which direction Barclay was taking the book. I paused; thought about it; thought about it some more and then made an educated decision. I had it solved, easy! Wrong – that’s where he changed all the rules and baffled me! It was like I was driving the wrong way up a one way street. Brilliant.
Available at The Book Depository & Amazon
The last two weeks have been difficult for David Harwood, a small-town reporter for the Promise Falls Standard in New York State, and things are about to get worse. His wife Jan is showing signs of depression and has hinted on numerous occasions that David and their four year old son Ethan would be better off without her. With Jan showing signs of suicidal tendencies and the paper struggling to survive, a day out at the amusement park could be just what the doctor ordered.
Things don’t quite go to plan; someone takes Ethan’s pushchair (the youngster sleeping and oblivious to his unplanned journey) and Jan goes missing – no matter how hard David and the police hunt for his wife she has simply vanished without a trace. As the investigation into her disappearance intensifies David becomes a “person of interest” and with the evidence rapidly mounting David’s life has turned on its head and the outlook is grim.
The thriller is a classic case of one step forward, two steps back. Often frustrated at what he discovers it takes all his energy to hang in, determined to prove his innocence and to find his son’s mother and reuniting his family.
Harwood is a wonderful character, intelligent but at the same time fallible and imperfect – most readers will relate to him in one way or another. He’s a regular guy caught up in a new and dangerous irregular world. We share his triumphs as we do his devastation, his journey is a voyage of self discovery, twisting and turning until its powerful conclusion.
So there we have it; a stunning novel, well delivered with more than its fair share of twists and turns and intelligent sub plots. It has been a difficult review to write, only in so much that to mention one sub plot invariably leads to another and another – I have no intention of spoiling anything!
Highly recommended. Available at The Book Depository & Amazon