Amazon Best Books of the Month, March 2010 With a storyline that's wound tighter than a rattlesnake's coil, author Linwood Barclay returns to play upon our deepest fears with Never Look Away. Journalist David Harwood is left only with questions after a family outing becomes a terrifying nightmare in the mere blink of an eye. Someone, it would seem, is out to get him, and when suspicious evidence labels him a “person of interest” in a mysterious disappearance, the unassuming Harwood is forced to bare his teeth in pursuit of the truth. Fans of Fear the Worst, Too Close to Home, and No Time for Goodbye should already know the drill: Barclay refuses to grant readers any respite with gut-wrenching plot twists that keep firing until the final page. But those unfamiliar with his work would be wise to clear their calendars for this engaging non-stop thriller. --Dave Callanan
Amazon Exclusive: Linwood Barclay on Never Look Away
 Years ago, when I worked on the city desk for The Toronto Star, every once in a while someone would phone in with a hot tip. Something they’d heard from a friend of a friend. The story was that children were being spirited away from a local theme park. Grabbed, disguised, thrown into a van and driven away so fast their parents hadn’t even noticed they were gone yet. And the kicker was, the story was being suppressed because the theme park owners didn’t want bad publicity. There was never, ever anything to it. I’d worked in the news business long enough to know that when a kid goes missing. That story gets out. Big time. Our theme park was not the only one where this urban myth played out. I’d heard the same story about a number of big attractions. But never with any real names attached. It always happened to the boyfriend of someone’s cousin’s brother’s boss. But the story stayed with me just the same. I started playing around with it in my head. I thought, okay, let’s start with the myth, but then let’s do something entirely different. Someone’s going to disappear, all right, but not the person you’re expecting... As I began working out the storyline for my new thriller, Never Look Away, the amusement park scene became a way in to a very different kind of tale for me. One about secrets, about past, hidden lives, about how sometimes the people we’re closest to are the ones we know the least. One significant way in which it differs from my previous novels is that it is not told entirely in first person. This time, there were things I had to keep from my protagonist that the reader just had to know. That time on the city desk was part of more than 30 years I spent working in newspapers. It was a period in which papers mattered a great deal. They still do, but it’s hardly news to point out they’re facing tough times, a perfect storm of changing technology meeting harsh economic realities. So when it came to deciding what that protagonist would do for a living, I decided to make him a reporter at a small daily that’s more concerned with maintaining revenues than breaking scandals, especially if breaking them will hurt the bottom line. (I like to point out, I never encountered anything like that at The Star.) I was well into writing this novel when Michael Connelly’s terrific novel The Scarecrow came out, which is also set against the backdrop of a newspaper in decline. I suspect these will not be the only two novels to explore--either in depth or in a tangential way--the significant changes this institution is going through. Another urban myth that used to get called into the paper now and again was that some unscrupulous developer was building houses so cheaply, someone’s piano went right through the living room floor. We never found that house, but there might still be a murder mystery in that story, especially if there was some poor bastard in that basement. --Linwood Barclay
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 Another winner from Barclay |
| Review Date: February 27, 2010 |
| Reviewer: DWD, Indianapolis, IN |
Linwood Barclay excells are writing books in which the average middle class guy (a car salesman in Fear the Worst: A Thriller , a newspaper reporter in this book) has his whole life turned upside down and is thrust into a world of crime, violence and intrigue. His books remind me of the old-fashioned film noire style except these are quicker and have even more turns.
In "Never Look Away", David Harwood is a reporter with a wife, a son, two loving parents who babysit their son and a hot lead on signs of corruption in local government that will make an explosive story. Suddenly, his wife disappears at a local theme park and he is accused of causing her disappearance.
More problems pile on and the pressure makes David and his world crumble.
There is a point in which the reader says, "What? Even more happens to this guy?"
Does it get ridiculous?
Absolutely.
More importantly, does the story work?
Absolutely.
This is a real page turner. I found myself losing real chunks of time if I picked this book up during my morning routine. I was nearly late to work two days in a row because I had to keep reading a little bit more.
I look forward to the next one, Mr. Barclay. |
exhilarating psychological investigative thriller
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| Review Date: March 12, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Harriet Klausner, |
In Promise Falls, New York David Harwood is a reporter for the Standard. He has been married to Jan for five years and they have a four-year-old son, Ethan. They seem like the perfect American family. Recently David has become concerned about Jan. She tells him dark things that frighten him. Depressed all the time, Jan believes the two men in her life would be better off if she was not in their lives. Jan talks of suicide so a desperate David suggests she visit their doctor or perhaps a psychologist. She angrily yells at him no as she refuses medical treatment.
David investigates the opening of a private company run prison owned and operated by Star Spangled Corrections. Inmates will work to pay for their keep and bring the firm profits. David believes something is off kilter with the deal that CEO Elmont Sebastian has made with town leaders; enhanced by a warning not to write anything derogatory or scandalous while his editor at the Standard refuses to print his prison articles. The Harwood trio visits Five Mountains amusement park where first Ethan and then Jan vanish while a frantic David searches for them. Ethan is found, but Jan is not and the police suspect her husband of foul play.
This is an exhilarating psychological investigative thriller starring a near hysterical lead protagonist who becomes the target of an investigation as no one seems willing to help him. The story line is fast-paced while nicely set up so that the reader comprehends David's need to learn and expose wrong doing while also feeling how deep Jan's depression goes. From there the tale takes off once the family becomes separated at the amusement park. Fans of taut suspense will relish aptly titled Never Look Away.
Harriet Klausner
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Edge of your seat story...
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| Review Date: March 14, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Luanne Ollivier, |
David Harwood is a newspaper reporter. He's been working on a story about a for profit prison being built in his small town. The editor keeps killing his story, even after he uncovers some shady dealings with local politicians. But he's really worried about his wife Jan. She's been acting oddly lately, saying disturbing things and just isn't her usual self. When she suggests a trip to an amusement park with their four year old son, he readily agrees, happy that she is acting more like herself.
What happens at the amusement park is the stuff of nightmares. And that's just the beginning...
And on that note, I absolutely refuse to give you any more of the plot! Suffice it to say, that Never Look Back had me on the edge of my seat. Barclay has crafted a non stop roller coaster of a plot, full of twists and turns that I never saw coming. The book starts off action packed and just never lets up. Barclay's foreshadowing had me reading just one more chapter long after the lights should have been out...
Have you read Linwood Barclay yet? If you're a suspense/thriller fan, than you will love this Canadian author!
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An Addictive and Seamless Thriller!
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| Review Date: June 7, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Bookreporter.com, New York, New York |
Linwood Barclay touched a nerve of mine in his wonderful new thriller, NEVER LOOK AWAY. Actually, he took that nerve, pinched it, stomped on it, and rolled it on the ground all within the first few pages.
About a quarter-century ago, I took my ungrateful and unappreciative sons to a theme restaurant named after a giant rodent who is not Mickey Mouse. I fished into my pocket to give quarters to my older son; when I looked down, my younger son (three years old at the time) was gone. It only took me a minute to find him --- he had wandered down the hall and, wise beyond his years, was heading out of the place --- but I have never known panic like I knew on that Sunday afternoon. That is, until Barclay begins describing the arrival of the Harwood family --- Dave, Jan and four-year old Ethan, of Promise Falls, New York --- at the Five Mountains Amusement Park and the subsequent disappearance of Ethan. Boom. Barclay puts you right there, up close and personal. If you've ever had a small child in your care wander off, all of the emotions that you went through will come rising back to the forefront when you read the first few pages of this novel.
NEVER LOOK AWAY would be remarkable enough solely on the basis of those opening pages, but Barclay is just getting warmed up. Ethan is found, but then Jan goes missing as well. And she doesn't turn up so easily. Dave is concerned because Jan has confessed to him that she has been having suicidal thoughts. Barry Duckworth, the Promise Falls, New York, police detective in charge of investigating Jan's disappearance, is concerned as well, but not about suicide. Duckworth is a tenacious investigator who leaves no stone unturned, and he is unable to confirm anything that Dave has told him. Gradually, Duckworth comes to believe that Dave knows a lot more than he is letting on. The reader is aware that what Dave is telling Duckworth is true; it's just that the evidence doesn't bear it out, pointing to something far more sinister. When Leanne Kowalski, Jan's co-worker, also goes missing, things look even worse.
Dave is concerned that his wife's disappearance may have something to do with the plans a developer has for a private prison. Dave, a reporter for a fading Promise Falls newspaper, has been asking tough questions and has been warned off of the story. He accordingly begins his own investigation into Jan's disappearance, and it takes him places he never wished to go. Dave's relatively peaceful life is in a tailspin, and it just keeps getting worse. And then, near the end, the unthinkable happens. Again.
You must read NEVER LOOK AWAY. Barclay's prose has been getting darker and darker with each new novel that releases, and this latest one comes close to being black as pitch, though there's a bit of light in spots. Barclay also creates some of his most interesting and memorable characters to date, not all of whom will make it to the last page. Oh, and one more thing concerning the prose. About halfway through the book, Barclay pens a scene set in a Denny's that, while brief, contains some of his best writing to date, which is really saying something. But wait. There is also a chapter --- I won't tell you which one, but it's past the halfway mark --- that begins with a great paragraph describing a car that's just this side of hunk-a-junk, and within a couple of sentences Barclay makes you see that vehicle, inside and out, as if it was sitting in your driveway. That's hard to do, but he makes it look easy. What is even more difficult, however, is to create a seamless plot with no loose ends. Barclay has that covered as well. He even takes care of the cat.
Read NEVER LOOK AWAY and you'll know what I mean. You will be loaning this book to friends and never getting it back. |
Too close for comfort
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| Review Date: June 29, 2010 |
| Reviewer: T. Edmund Jenkin, |
Never Look Away ranks amongst the best thrillers released this year. While not so deep as to be ever considered literary, the characters of this novel have a realness that is both heart-breaking and frightening.
The story is told by David, a small-time reporter who gets himself mixed up in controversy surrounding the construction of a privately run prison in his home-town of Paradise Falls. After making a few barbed comments to a local politician, the CEO of Star-Spangled Corrections and his hired thug pay David a private visit that leaves him wondering if he's bitten off more than he can chew.
As if that wasn't enough David's wife Jan begins to show signs of depression, and while there is a twist on this later I found this sequence of events particularly heart-renching.
The real action begins when Jan and her work-mate disappear and an official police investigation is launched with David as the prime-suspect. Caught between corrupt politicians, a suspicious and stubborn detective, David struggles to deal with the disappearance of his wife and destruction of his life as he knew it.
So while the characters are well thought out and the plotline is intelligent Never Look Away has some imperfections - some of the characters are a hairsbreadth away from stereotypeland and there are aspects of the wife's disappearance which (aside from being hard to explain without spoilers) are a little theme-less, uninteresting and hard to fully reconcile with the overall storyline.
Perhaps it's hard to grasp what the heck I mean here so I'd be interested in hearing what other readers have to say about it...
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