subject: Never Look Away By Linwood Barclay [print this page] I read Barclay's last book and was impressed with his portrayal of an ordinary family man faced with the Hitchcockian horror of his daughter disappearing at work but her employer denying she ever worked there. However, I felt the evil gang who did it to not be credible, and the final action sequences just too much.
Barclay must have read what I wrote, because this latest novel retains the strong emotional pull of an ordinary man faced with an incredible disappearance of his wife, and the consequences.
This time, the evil at work is much more credible -- at least the surface cleverness but ultimate stupidity of the woman carrying the burden of a childhood tragedy nobody should have to experience. And it's not what you think, and Barclay handles it quite well.
I did find the mob factor less than believable, however. Would a smuggling courier really take the risk he did? He is partially guilty for what happened, just because he was so smart he failed to account for the stupidity of potential thieves after him.
And I also did not find the portrayal of the tycoon who wants to put a privately owned prison in the small town of the book credible. Come on, can't thriller fiction have responsible and successful big business people? I don't go along with demonizing big business.
Yet I have to admit the subplot of the tycoon and the proposed private prison against our hero (who's a small town reporter fighting not only local corruption and the idea of a privately owned and operated prison, but the small newspaper he's working for which is trying to survive a period when everybody is getting their news online.
I didn't find the climax quite satisfying, but it was better than the one in the previous book. I knew that the woman was going to somehow redeem herself due to her love for her son, and was waiting to see how Barclay was going to pull it off. I'd have written something different, but that's life.
He's a more successful author than I am, so there.
So Barclay sets up an interesting tension and contrast between the good guy and the woman who is not really bad, but certainly busy acting that way.
As well as stupidly self-destructive. When we meet main squeeze Dwayne we know that no matter clever she may have been in many ways, she's deep down inside asking to be caught and stopped.
In the end, I'm not sure whether the ending could be classified as "happy" or not.
The truly guilty party tried to commit suicide, but he's had a miserable life for the past twenty or so years anyway, and he was never bad, just also stupid, careless and not paying attention to what he loved the most.
The obvious bad person died, but they were as much the victim of incredible bad luck and the man's stupid carelessness as the dead girl was. In a very real way, they both died that day.
The hero and his son live on. The boy is the obvious good consequence of a long series of events.
The difficult part is accepting how the woman managed to live for years as a good wife and mother, totally accepted as such by her husband and son, though not (secretly) by her mother-in-law.
But I guess that's a subtle commentary on the situation. Without the childhood tragedy, she would have grown up to be a normal woman and been a good wife and mother.
And in fact, she always had that choice. It was the tragedy that drove her to take up with Dwayne, but she was never forced to.
And she could have remained in her role as good wife and mother, and never let stupid greed take her away from it.
But instead she chose Dwayne and her dream of an easy life, and threw away the one she already had.
