The thing about jacket blurbs is this: What if you’re an up-and-coming Scandinavian mystery writer and your publisher hails you as the next Stieg Larsson? Obviously, your publisher has never actually tasted the overcooked gristly ham known as Larsson, so you have no choice but to sue for defamation.
But what if you’re Linwood Barclay and your publisher repeatedly quotes Peter Robinson? “If you like Harlan Coben, you’ll love Linwood Barclay.” Do you get angry, as in enough already? But what if it sells books? (It does.) And what if it’s true? (It is.)
Coben and Barclay are masters of the genre known as “domestic suspense” (the mom-and-pop thriller). Coben began this roller coaster 10 years ago with his stunning Tell No One, in which the hero is haunted by his “dead” wife (the French director Guillaume Canet actually ratcheted up the suspense when he moved the story to France from New Jersey in his 2006 Ne le dis à personne).
Barclay’s first stand-alone thriller, No Time for Goodbye, appeared in 2007, offering a chilling scenario: A teenager wakes up to find her family missing. New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin gives Coben the edge in “popcorn pacing,” but says Barclay’s books are “a lot less loony.”
The Accident is, as they say, ripped from the headlines. The plot’s trigger is debt, and greed. (You know it’s hard times because the Canadian edition of The Accident is only a trade paperback.) The wife of our ordinary guy/everyman hero (a struggling contractor, in this case) parks her car on an off-ramp and is one of three people killed when another car plows into her. According to the autopsy, she was drunk. Her husband says no way. (If this sounds slightly familiar, you may be thinking of the Long Island “supermom” who, in July of 2009, drove two miles the wrong way on New York’s Taconic State Parkway before colliding with an SUV and killing herself and seven others, including her two-year-old daughter and three nieces. According to the autopsy, she was drunk. Her husband said no way. The HBO movie aired in July.)
While our small-town American dad tries to make sense of what happened, his eight-year-old daughter becomes a target of bullying. His business, meanwhile, is suffering as a result of the debt crisis (not to mention the fact he could be facing a lawsuit after a house he was building burned down), his top employee is losing his home to the bank and his mother-in-law really hates him. And then one of his wife’s friends falls off a pier – an accident, the police say. As the plot thickens, the various twists and turns bring to mind one of those Russian matryoshkas, where dolls of decreasing size are placed one inside the other. Who knew there was so much evil in American suburbia?
Barclay, a former Toronto Star columnist, knows how to tell a story, knows how to pace it, knows how to make those pages keep turning. And as the bodies start to pile up, our ordinary guy finds himself under siege, seemingly locked in a world of small-town madness, surrounded by friends, neighbours and co-workers all desperately trying to stave off the results of their various criminous deeds.
The mayhem created by Barclay’s characters may, at times, seem over the top. But the only real annoyance derives from the author’s use of a prologue (they should be banned) and the old “had I but known” device that leads off the first chapter. The good news is that no pets were harmed in the telling of the story – contrary to the usual role played by dogs or cats in a novel of “domestic suspense.”
And oh yeah, without giving anything away, beware the knockoff purse – it’ll kill you every time.
Larry Orenstein is a member of Crime Writers of Canada and an editor in the Comment section of The Globe and Mail.
