The uncorrected proof of No Time for Goodbye really didn't need the blurb from Peter Robinson enticing potential readers with the line: "If you liked Harlan Coben, you'll love Linwood Barclay".
Substitute Coben's suburban New Jersey for Barclay's coastal Connecticut, added to a storyline of extraordinary (and dangerous) things happening to seemingly ordinary people, throw in precise, controlled story-telling, fine characterisation and a dramatic build-up in tension and you have a vintage Coben bottled and corked by the Canadian writer, who is adding a first standalone novel to a four book series featuring science fiction writer Zack Walker.
In the UK at least, Barclay has yet to develop much of a profile, but No Time for Goodbye should change that as it joins the rush for the post Christmas book voucher spend when it is published here in January (following a successful September launch in North America).
Barclay's story begins with 14-year old Cynthia Bigge waking up one morning, after being carpeted the night before for breaking all sorts of parental rules, to find an empty house. When she returns home from school later she realises that her parents and brother have disappeared without either trace or explanation.
A quarter of a century later, she is now Cynthia Archer, married to a kind and gentle schoolmaster, with a young daughter of her own, and still carrying the deep scars of still-mysterious past.
The profound psychological impact her abandonment has on Cynthia - a situation that includes the fact that she has no idea if her family is dead or left her on her own on purpose - plays a huge role in the early chapters of the story. That this is incredibly skilfully handled is to a large degree the key to the success of the book. Cynthia is paranoid and neurotic and traps her family in her own past with her inability to move on sufficiently for them to develop their own lives. It causes friction in her marriage and frustrates her 8-year-old daughter, who is smotheringly mothered.
When signs begin to emerge that her family might not be dead and that they are trying to contact her, the tensions are only intensified.
Barclay brilliantly brings this pressure cook to the boil, creating a claustrophobic environment breeding mistrust, anger and resentment. From there he launches a more conventional thriller in which Cynthia and her long-suffering husband Terry launch a desperate search for the truth before that elusive commodity finds them and tears them apart.
And as the body count rises, so do the questions that must be answered and suddenly everybody is under suspicion.
If I have one criticism of No Time For Goodbye - and in all honesty this is really only nit-picking, I thoroughly enjoyed this book - it is that Barclay gives the game away a little early and long-time students of the Harlan Coben approach to thriller-writing will spot the twists in the climax a good 30 pages before the author might have wanted them to.
But no matter. This is a terrific thriller, and one that should herald the arrival of Linwood Barclay. Perfect either for those post-Christmas blues or (if you can get hold of a copy earlier) for that moment on December 25 when you just need to be alone for a little while.
