An excellent page-turner: great plot, very well-developed, very readable and well-written.
My first Linwood Barclay but definitely not my last. Journalists who turn to thriller writing have a long and illustrious track record for knowing what they are doing: you could argue that it started with Edgar Allan Poe who, when the poor man wasn't dying in a ditch in Baltimore, put in some time as a journalist, of sorts, and in his spare time laid the foundations for modern thriller writing. Graham Greene. Ross MacDonald. Stephen King. Michael Connelly. Steig Larsson. Google it for yourself, it's quite an impressive list ...
What do journalists know about writing, that lends itself to thriller writing? Don't bury the lede. Structure: a story has an engine, and you have to keep it firing over. How evidence presents itself -- and adds up into a story. How dialogue enhances a story. What makes characters interesting, and either relatable or objectionable ... Or, as Elmore Leonard (who was not a journalist, but writes like one) says, "... leave out the part that readers tend to skip. ... If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it."
(I don't think it's a spoiler to say that part of the plot hinges on the manuscript of a literary novel that, we are told, was a huge best seller, and made the author a Literary Darling. And it's hilarious, it's so bad ... )
In Too Close to Home, Linwood Barclay has a cracker of a premise, frightening and all too plausible. The pages tick over nicely, with a steady stream of clues presented and random revelations turning out to have more importance than first appeared. The ending/solution to the mystery does not disappoint. (All too often, something that has been chugging along nicely falls flat at the end, as you're told that the cat did it. Or the person you suspected, and rejected as too obvious, on page 2.)
This falls in the much-honored category, in our house of "better than it needed to be." I'm going to get my hands on more Linwood Barclay.
My first Linwood Barclay but definitely not my last. Journalists who turn to thriller writing have a long and illustrious track record for knowing what they are doing: you could argue that it started with Edgar Allan Poe who, when the poor man wasn't dying in a ditch in Baltimore, put in some time as a journalist, of sorts, and in his spare time laid the foundations for modern thriller writing. Graham Greene. Ross MacDonald. Stephen King. Michael Connelly. Steig Larsson. Google it for yourself, it's quite an impressive list ...
What do journalists know about writing, that lends itself to thriller writing? Don't bury the lede. Structure: a story has an engine, and you have to keep it firing over. How evidence presents itself -- and adds up into a story. How dialogue enhances a story. What makes characters interesting, and either relatable or objectionable ... Or, as Elmore Leonard (who was not a journalist, but writes like one) says, "... leave out the part that readers tend to skip. ... If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it."
(I don't think it's a spoiler to say that part of the plot hinges on the manuscript of a literary novel that, we are told, was a huge best seller, and made the author a Literary Darling. And it's hilarious, it's so bad ... )
In Too Close to Home, Linwood Barclay has a cracker of a premise, frightening and all too plausible. The pages tick over nicely, with a steady stream of clues presented and random revelations turning out to have more importance than first appeared. The ending/solution to the mystery does not disappoint. (All too often, something that has been chugging along nicely falls flat at the end, as you're told that the cat did it. Or the person you suspected, and rejected as too obvious, on page 2.)
This falls in the much-honored category, in our house of "better than it needed to be." I'm going to get my hands on more Linwood Barclay.
