Fear the Worst by Linwood Barclay

Fear the Worst is Barclay's third novel, and I achievement not the last. It's a not a abundant thriller, but absolutely -- until the end -- a acute one.

Tim Blake is an accustomed guy bent up in a web of ambidexterity that's about Hitchcockian. He's a car agent disturbing to accord with his bootless alliance (his ex-wife is now active with a acclimated car banker he despises), his daughter's near-adulthood, and the banking pressures from accepting gone broke as a car dealer.

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Yet he's an overwhelmingly appropriate guy. You like him. He makes a lot of mistakes, aloof as any of us would, but he does his best, and it turns out to be about enough. He's pushed hard, and learns to advance back.

What's abnormal is that for a abomination thriller, this is such a atypical of appearance -- at atomic until the artifice requirements booty over the ending.

We see him with his daughter, with his ex-wife and her boyfriend, the batty woman he's been dating, with co-workers, his boss, his daughter's friends... we apprentice about him and them through chat that's absolute and funny.

After his babe disappears, we feel his absolute affliction as he worries about her.

And his adventure to acquisition his babe takes him abysmal into the close lives of bodies than he's anytime had to go before. There's a lot of advice appear about how bodies alive and association that would be arid "social commentary" if not portrayed in absorbing fiction.

Of course, this is generally an aspect of acceptable thrillers, to booty the clairvoyant into areas of poverty, abomination and amusing abasement than they appetite to go in person. Barclay manages to cull it off with wit and good-heartedness.

This additionally has acceptable elements as a thriller. Things appear which you don't apprehend until after are "clues." He plants accessible foreshadowings that pay off (the iPod), and others that are harbinger men (Milt the reindeer).

Unfortunately, appear the end I chock-full believing. I apperceive that animal trafficking is a "hot" subject. I aloof don't accept that such gangs as depicted actuality abide in the United States. Sorry. Yes, there are restaurants and such places that are accommodating to appoint actionable immigrants for cash. But I don't accept they'd go for the army of zombies declared here.

Nor did I absolutely accept the "other" villain of the book. To name this being would accord abroad the catastrophe too much. However, I wasn't aloof wasn't convinced, and their afterlife was aloof too accessible and convenient, admitting I accept about all-important to antithesis the angry they did.

However, the arena in the car dealership appearance allowance is excellent. It'd accomplish a agitating cine -- which the columnist maybe hoped for!

So this book is able-bodied account reading. I'm attractive advanced to account added novels by Linwood Barclay.

Fear the Worst by Linwood Barclay