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Linwood Barclay has a flourishing specialty in the thriller involving the (relatively) innocent suburban husband and father who finds himself caught up in a baffling and dangerous series of events he cannot initially comprehend, events that require him to utilize survival skills he did not know he possessed. While THE ACCIDENT echoes this pattern to a considerable degree, it seems to me that it is a darker and more topically relevant novel than the earlier ones have been. Glen Garber, like pretty much everyone he knows in his Connecticut town, has been hard hit by the recession. He's a building contractor and his business has suffered from the housing crisis and the credit crunch. His wife Sheila has a job at a big-box home centre, but things are tight. Both cast around for ways to make extra money and Sheila is taking a night course in accountancy to better manage Glen's business. It is from this class that she does not return one night and Glen learns that she has been killed in a car accident. If that is not bad enough, the accident was Sheila's fault - driving while drunk she parked cross-wise on the exit ramp of an expressway and caused a collision that killed not only herself but the occupants of another car. Glen is devastated. He blames himself for all the obscure reasons that survivors often do and others blame him for letting Sheila drive when she had a drinking problem. Except that, as far as Glen knows, she didn't. Here Barclay seems to be taking his inspiration from a recent case in New York State in which a respectable middle-class housewife drove herself and a van-load of children the wrong way down a divided highway, with tragic results. A recent documentary film on the attempts of the woman's family to restore her reputation failed to find the resolution they sought - Barclay will press toward a more satisfactory conclusion. Glen decides he must investigate the accident further. As he does so, he discovers that his comfortable middle-class circle of friends and associates are all involved in a variety of dubious quasi-criminal activities to shore up the family finances in a time of recession. And one or more of them might be willing to kill to keep their secrets safe. In the end, Barclay provides his typical, somewhat over-the-top, tension-filled resolution. But it is Glen's trajectory to that point that is the most interesting. No one it seems, in Milford at least, has retained much in the way of moral or ethical standards when faced with threats to their economic well-being. Many engage in relatively minor crime, but some are involved with organized crime and with people who can and do kill to keep it all going. Even Glen himself, who is shocked by what he learns, cheats on his taxes from time to time. In this context, the elaborate reveal at the end is something of a distraction. THE ACCIDENT might have been a surprisingly bleak account of life in an America where appearances count for more than substance and are seldom what they imply But that seriousness is frittered away in pursuit of a high-tension ending that has too little to do with the book as a whole. Still, as ever, Barclay delivers a solidly commercial product that is pretty much guaranteed to keep the reader hooked until the final paragraph. § Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, September 2011
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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