Ok so I’ve written before that I loved Linwood Barclay‘s Zack Walker books and wished that he kept writing them. When I questioned him about that he said that while the books received critical acclaim they just didn’t sell well, then he started writing standalone thrillers and his career took off! While after finishing his latest book Trust Your Eyes, I will never again question his decision and I will eagerly awaiting his next standalone!! For me Trust Your Eyes is the best book he has written yet and I am not alone in the opinion:
“Dazzling. Barclay brings a classic Hitchcock premise into the twenty-first century, with the power of an artist at the top of his game…. This book deserves to catapult him to the top of every bestseller list” Joseph Finder
“The best Barclay so far, a tale Hitchcock would have loved…riveting, frequently scary, occasionally funny, and surprisingly, wonderfully tender… great entertainment from a suspense master” Stephen King
The plot revolves around two brothers, Thomas and Ray Kilbride. Thomas is a map-obsessed schizophrenic, who lives at home with his father and his maps. Through the website Whirl360.com Thomas travels the world not only studying maps, but also the buildings and shops, kinda like Google Earth street view. Thomas thinks he’s studying maps to save the world when all the paper maps are gone and a catastrophe hits on-line and all the maps of the world are gone! When Adam Kilbride their farmer dies in a freak accident, Ray an illustrator, who lives in Burlington, Vt comes home to Prinse Falls, NY to settle the estate and see to the future care of Thomas. One night, Thomas calls Ray into his room. He shows him what appears to be a murder on Orchard Avenue in New York City. While not totally clear it seems to be a woman with a plastic bag over her head being suffocated. Soon Ray, to placate Thomas, is off to NYC to see what may have happened. While his half-hearted investigation didn’t really shed much light on what happened, it did put them in the center of a deadly conspiracy, that threatens their very survival!
The book like all of Barclay’s books, is a well written page turner, with lots of twists and turns. and it really is a book that’s hard to put down. All of the characters are well drawn and you really feel for them and need to know what happened not only to the woman in the window but their Dad!
