Take Your Breath Away by Linwood Barclay
This is the latest in a long line of brilliant thrillers that this man has written over the last ten years or so. He is the author of the best thriller I have ever read, “No Time for Goodbye”, but this in my view nearly equals that book.
Andy Carville has had to change his name because, some years ago, whilst he was away for the weekend with his best friend, Greg, his wife Brie disappeared. No trace of her was ever found and Andy became the police’s number one suspect. But they could not find one piece of substantive evidence against him.
Ever since, Brie’s sister Isabel has been desperately encouraging the police to arrest him.Eventually, he sold the house for less than it was worth. The new owner tears the old house down and builds a modern structure in its place. Andy has moved a few miles away and changed his name from Mason to Carville. He has tried to restart his life and Jayne, his new partner, has been a substantial help to him in that regard as has his old friend, Greg.
Now, six years later, he receives a phone call from his old next-door neighbour, Max. A woman has turned up who looks a lot like Brie and has stood in the old driveway and demanded to know where her old house has gone. She has made a nuisance of herself with the new owners and has driven off leaving her shopping strewn across the driveway. The new owner has filmed part of what happened. When Andy looks at that footage, it does look like Brie.
The police are informed and old questions and suspicions are reactivated. Has Brie returned and, if she has, where has she been and what has she been doing?
This narrative, as always with Barclay, throws up plenty of red herrings and also you discover that some small issues are going to matter in the end like Andy’s habit of tearing up beermats and flicking them away.
This setup is extraordinary and leads Andy into a tortuous sequence of events as he tries to piece together what has happened while the police and Brie’s family continue to harass him in their certainty that he ultimately killed his wife.
I read the book in two days despite its hardback edition being 449 pages long. I was simply gripped by Barclay’s habit of keeping the story going at a cracking pace and constantly leading to more remarkable revelations.
Because of the very nature of the book, to tell you any more would be giving away the ending or leading you towards the ending.
I recommend this book and this author without reservation.