Barclay, Linwood: Fear the Worst

Bantam © 2009, 416 pages

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This is the third book I've read by Linwood Barclay, and I'm beginning to think that I should forego all responsibilities for a time and allow myself to tear through his entire oeuvre in a breathless few weeks of pure pleasure reading. Fear the Worst is a fantastic read: pure suspense, great plotting, a perfect page-turner. (Or in my case, a perfect next page clicker, since I read this one on the Kindle, much of the time while exercising on a treadmill: I surely walked farther than I would have without this stimulation.) As for the plot: Tim Blake is a car salesman and the divorced father of a 17-year-old, Sydney, who's staying with him for the summer. She goes off to work one day at the desk of a small hotel in Milford, Connecticut, and doesn't come home. When he goes to the hotel to find out where she is he's told that she never worked there. Thus it begins: Tim throws himself into the task of trying to find Sydney and discovers that the explanation for her disappearance is far more complicated than he could have imagined. Meanwhile, the police aren't much help, since they seem to be looking at him as a suspect. Eventually, going rogue seems to be Tim's only option, so that by book's end he's running not only from the bad guys but from the police. False leads and false friends complicate his investigation, but eventually all is revealed in a tense ending which, however, does feel a little too rushed. Other than that slight misgiving, I've got nothing to complain about.