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Linwood Barclay's previous novel NO TIME FOR GOODBYE featured an ordinary man having to find hidden depths in himself when his family stability is threatened. The new one covers similar territory. Jim Cutter's your everyman, but one who's given up hopes of being an artist to run his own garden maintenance company. His wife Ellen works for a pompous author whose 15 minutes of fame was quite some time ago. Son Derek is your average grunty teenager who thinks with his lower appendage. Their thoroughly ordinary life is turned around when their next-door neighbours, the Langleys, are gunned down. Derek knows more than he's telling. And it looks like the killers might have visited the wrong house. Inevitably, Barclay will be compared with Harlan Coben. But whereas Coben's good at making you root for his characters, I felt no connection to Cutter and his family or, indeed, anyone else in the book. This was exacerbated by some deeply annoying moments where I was muttering “yeah, just tell the police, already!” Characters with flaws are generally interesting. Barclay's aren't. Cutter is juvenile (the smart comments get old very quickly), Ellen tops the league in moronic decisions and Randy the mayor isn't just annoying, he's over-the-top clichéd (and someone please tell me that the UK slang meaning of randy doesn't mean the same in the States – if it does, Barclay goes straight to the bottom of the class for ‘nyuk, nyuk, no that's not funny' lack of subtlety in naming his characters). I can guarantee that you will guess what happens before you're even halfway through the novel. So there's no tension – and that cheap writing technique of tacking "had I but known …" onto the ends of chapters falls facedown in a gutter. I wonder, too, why some Canadian authors feel the need to situate their novels in bland American towns rather than their own country. Oh wait, let me guess … Surely it's not because they think American crime fiction fans won't pick up anything that's set outside of the US? NO TIME FOR GOODBYE had its flaws, but it was a fun enough read and had some depth to it. In the new book, I think we're supposed to sympathise with Jim Cutter and family. I didn't. The disappointingly flimsy TOO CLOSE TO HOME takes two step forwards and three back.
Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, April 2009
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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