November 2017

I have been a longtime fan of Linwood Barclay’s work, and in PARTING SHOT he returns to Promise Falls, the upstate New York town where he has set many of his books, including the Promise Falls trilogy. Here longtime readers will reconnect with Cal Weaver, a local private investigator, and Detective Barry Duckworth. The subject here is revenge and the dark turns it can take.

Jeremy Pilford was accused of killing his girlfriend while driving under the influence. Drawing on a headline that many will remember, Jeremy’s defense was modeled after the real-life Texas boy who got off on an affluenza defense. Here he gets christened “Big Baby.” And people are out to make an example of him and are hunting him down. And then we have Brian Gaffney, who awakens with a tattoo crudely chiseled onto his back. What’s the meaning of the message there? And why was Brian targeted?

There’s boots-on-the-ground detective work, as well as back stories about all the characters, which enhance the storytelling. In his writing Barclay is about character, as well as plot. So many thriller authors sacrifice one for the other, at their peril, but for him multiple characters play off each other well to move the story along. Swipes at the media and the omnipresent challenges of social media layer into the story, making this a thought-provoking work, as well as one that has all the twists and turns that readers love from Barclay.