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By now, we've come to know what to expect from a Linwood Barclay thriller. An ordinary man, no hero, finds himself in inexplicable and dangerous circumstances and must grope his way through puzzle and misdirection to save himself and his family from evil they neither willed nor were party to. That's where NEVER LOOK AWAY begins. David Harwood, an unambitious newspaper reporter on a floundering small-city paper goes to the local amusement park with his wife and small son. The little boy, still in his stroller, disappears and he and his wife hare off in different directions to look for him. The child is found, still asleep and unharmed, but the wife has now vanished completely. In the weeks leading up to the visit to the park, the wife has hinted at suicidal feelings and David fears the worst. But the police smell a rat - no one else who knows Mrs Harwood saw anything odd in her behaviour and there is no firm evidence that she was ever actually in the park. Rapidly, David becomes "a person of interest" to the police. The device that employs the mysterious disappearance of a character whose very existence is then denied dates back at least to the early years of the last century in an urban legend that involves an entire hotel room along with the mother it contained. Hitchcock used a variant in The Lady Vanishes to great effect. So it's always a pleasure to see what new changes can be rung on the old staple. Barclay does not belabour the device. He leads us along, planting a hint here and a hint there and just as we think we are coming to the evident conclusion, the plot makes an abrupt turn and we are pointed off in another direction. It is difficult to say very much about how it all goes without giving away far too much about this plot-driven book, except that the various twists and turns are sufficiently entertaining to keep one reading past one's bedtime. And plot-driven it is. The characters are even more lightly drawn than usual in a Barclay thriller. Newspaperman David is nice enough, but not much more than nice. His mother and father are also nice, if irritating, as mothers and fathers tend to be. His town, the ambiguously-named Promise Falls (also the scene of the previous TOO CLOSE TO HOME) ironically seems more like an American vision of a small Canadian city than a Canadian writer's take on upstate New York. Still, it would take a far worse writer than the accomplished Barclay to fail to hook an audience with the theme of a vanished family member. And Barclay's an old hand with the notion - he's done at least two previous versions of it to date. This one may be a bit darker, though not deeper, than the others, but I can almost guarantee that if you start reading it, you will certainly finish it and find yourself much diverted along the way.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, March 2010
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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