Never Look Away By Linwood Barclay

This is the second Linwood Barclay’s book I have read, the first being No Time For Goodbye.  And like the first book, this blew me away! The author is brilliant at writing domestic thrillers that keep you on the edge of your seat.

Never Look Away by Linwood Barclay

As Never Look Away starts, things are not going well for David Harwood, a small-town reporter of the Promise Falls Standard. The newspaper is struggling to survive. He then gets a lead about a potential corruption scandal involving a controversial for-profit prison development project for the outskirts of this picturesque upstate New York town. But he has difficulty pinning the people involved and his newspaper seems unwilling to publish the story. To make matter worse, his wife Jan has recently been experiencing severe bouts of depression and has admitted to David that she has even considered suicide.

Both David and Jan could use a break so Jan made arrangements for them to make a trip to the local amusement park with their four year old son Ethan.  It quickly turns into a nightmare starting with the disappearance of their son. David and Jan go separate way in their frantic search for their son. David finds him, still asleep in his stroller. But to his dismay, his wife has disappeared, vanished into thin air!

After the police uncover an abundance of clues pointing to David as a suspect in the disappearance, the mystery deepens when it comes to light that Jan’s work-mate also disappeared on the same day as Jan. Caught between a corrupt politician, a corrupt police head, a corrupt businessman, and a stubborn detective, David mounts his own investigation to clear his name and restore his family. Everyone in town thinks he killed his wife.

When no other suspects have appeared a third of the way through the novel, it is apparent that someone has done a brilliant job of framing Harwood.

The novel never loses pace, accompanied by lots of twists as it hurtles to its mind-numbing conclusion. I highly recommend it and I am looking forward to read more books by this splendid author.