Never Look Away Decide Now

Disclaimer: A free copy of this book was received from Amazon Vine in exchange for an honest review.

Warning: This review contains spoilers-- but it's next to impossible to write the review without them.

Never Look Away by Linwood Barclay is billed as an impossible to put down thriller. I will agree that it was a quick, easy read, but it never quite came together for me. David Harwood is a reporter at a small town newspaper whose world is turned upside down when his son is kidnapped for a brief period of time at an amusement park, after which his wife disappears, and he falls under suspicion of having murdered her. At the same time, he is writing a news story about corruption at City Hall involving the building of a local prison and is being contacted by mysterious informants and threatened by the head of the prison company.

All too quickly we learn that his wife is not the woman he thought she was and so on and so forth-- and that is probably where my problem with this book lies because there really are no surprises. The story is told from both Harwood's point of view and that of his wife so there is no suspense as to what actually happened to her. The corruption story at City Hall is kind of unbelievable to begin with (not the corruption part, the part about threatening the reporter)-- I mean, come on. This is in a small town in New York. If the prison isn't built here, it will be built somewhere else. The president of the company doesn't need to make threats against a hick town reporter, nor does he need to bribe the council members.

At no time is there ever any sense that Harwood is actually in danger, either of prosecution or of anything else, and very little sense of danger involving his son. Nor do we ever get any sense of pain on his part at finding out that the woman he has loved and lived with for five years has been living a lie. I just really couldn't bring myself to care about any of the characters, with the possible exception of the parents of the woman whose identify Harwood's wife assumed.

This is the kind of book that Harlan Coben could have written-- but he would have done it much better. If you like Coben's stuff, then read something by him instead, because from what I saw in this book, Barclay is an extremely pale wanna be.Get more detail about Never Look Away.