Linwood Barclay

"It's been two months since private investigator Cal Weaver's teenage son Scott died in a tragic accident. Ever since, he and his wife have drifted apart, fracturing a once-normal life. Cal is mired in grief, a grief he can't move past. And maybe his grief has clouded his judgment. Because driving home one night, he makes his first big mistake. A girl drenched in rain taps on his car window and asks for a ride as he sits at a stoplight. Even though...

"The New York Times bestselling master of psychological suspense returns with a riveting thriller in which the possible heirs of a wealthy dying man are mysteriously being eliminated, one by one by one"-- Tech billionaire Miles Cookson has everything he could dream of-- except time. Recently diagnosed with a terminal illness, there is a fifty percent chance that it can be passed on to the next generation. Two decades ago young, struggling Miles was...

Four people board an elevator in a Manhattan office tower, press the buttons for their floor. The elevator proceeds, non-stop... then plummets to the bottom of the shaft. It appears to be a horrific tragedy... until the next day it happens again, in a different skyscraper. The third day plunges the city into chaos. What does this sabotage have to do with the fingerless body found on the High Line? New York detectives and journalists race to find the...

It's the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, May 23rd, and the small town of Promise Falls, New York, has found itself in the midst of a full-blown catastrophe. Hundreds of people are going to the hospital with similar flu-like symptoms--and dozens have died. Investigators quickly zero in on the water supply. But the question for many, including private investigator Cal Weaver, remains: Who would benefit from a mass poisoning of this town? Meanwhile,...

From the New York Times bestselling author of Find You First and Elevator Pitch comes a gripping psychological thriller about a formerly missing woman who has suddenly returned under mysterious circumstances. One weekend, while Andrew Mason was on a fishing trip, his wife, Brie, vanished without a trace. Most everyone assumed Andy had got away with murder--it's always the husband, isn't it?--but the police could never build a strong case against...

Thomas Kilbride is a map-obsessed schizophrenic who rarely leaves the bastion of his bedroom. But with a computer program called Whirl360.com, he travels the globe. Memorizing the streets of the world, Thomas examines every address as well as the people frozen in time on his computer screen. Then he sees something that anyone else could have, but didn't: an image in a window that looks like a woman being murdered.

Long and short of it--Barclay delivers on the hype. Fear the Worst starts with one of the better opening lines I've read in a while: "The morning of the day I lost her, my daughter asked me to scramble her some eggs." It's such a simple sentence, speaking of everyday domesticity. You can picture a father. You can picture a daughter. Yet you're already filled with dread. A bad thing has happened. And yeah, for the next four hundred pages, the bad thing...

“The best thriller I’ve read in five years.”—Stephen King
A warm summer Saturday. An amusement park. David Harwood is glad to be spending some quality time with his wife and their four-year-old son. But what begins as a pleasant family outing turns into a nightmare after an inexplicable disappearance. A frantic search only leads to an even more shocking and harrowing turn of events. Until this terrifying moment,

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Fourteen-year-old Cynthia Bigge wakes up one morning to find her entire family gone. Twenty-five years later, their unexplained disappearance still haunts her. She agrees to appear on the reenactment show Deadline, hoping the TV exposure might provide her with some answers, although her husband, English teacher Terry Archer, is considerably more skeptical. Indeed, not long after the show airs, the two are shaken down by a psychic, receive a series...

“A talented writer with a gift for the absurd and a wicked take on life.”—January Magazine
“Barclay is the master.”—The Wall Street Journal
Newspaper writer, family man, and reluctant hero Zack Walker has stumbled onto some dicey stories before, but nothing like what he’s about to uncover when a mutilated corpse is found at his father’s lakeside fishing camp. As always, Zack...