In the latest chilling thriller from New York Times bestselling author Linwood Barclay, a man’s world is upended after he finds his father and a woman who isn’t his mother dead in the family home—and his mother goes missing. Every family has secrets, but when Reece visits his parents’ home he’s shocked to find his father and a woman he assumes is his mother in bed. Dead. At first glance it looks like a murder-suicide perpetrated by his father, but on closer inspection there’s clearly more to the story. For starters, inconsistencies in the crime scene suggest his dad may not have shot himself. As Reece, shaken by his horrifying discovery, awaits questioning from the police, his phone lights up. It’s a call from his mom—his real mom. The dead woman in that bed is clearly not the person Reece believed her to be. His mom is at a lunch date with friends, she says, and can’t raise her husband on the phone. Could Reece drop by and see if everything’s okay? At a loss for how to tell his mother her husband is dead in bed with another woman, Reece simply tells “Come home now.” But instead of rushing home, she disappears. Could she have been involved? Was she seeking revenge on her husband and a mistress? Or, just as frightening, did someone kill Reece’s father and that woman, thinking wrongly that Reece’s mother had been dispatched? And what might this grisly scene have to do with the unscrupulous pharma company Reece’s father worked for years ago? Soon Reece finds himself questioning how well he really knew his parents—who they were, what they did, and who they hurt. Most importantly, he needs to figure out who might want to hurt him and his own family now.
Author
Linwood Barclay is the #1 internationally bestselling author of seventeen novels for adults, including No Time for Goodbye, Trust Your Eyes and, most recently, A Noise Downstairs. He has also written two novels for children and screenplays. Three of those seventeen novels comprise the epic Promise Falls trilogy: Broken Promise, Far From True, and The Twenty-Three. His two novels for children – Chase and Escape – star a computer-enhanced dog named Chipper who’s on the run from the evil organization that turned him into a super-pup. Barclay’s 2011 thriller, The Accident, has been turned into the six-part television series L’Accident in France, and he adapted his novel Never Saw it Coming for the movie, directed by Gail Harvey and starring Eric Roberts and Emily Hampshire. Several of his other books either have been, or still are, in development for TV and film. After spending his formative years helping run a cottage resort and trailer park after his father died when he was 16, Barclay got his first newspaper job at the Peterborough Examiner, a small Ontario daily. In 1981, he joined the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest circulation newspaper. He held such positions as assistant city editor, chief copy editor, news editor, and Life section editor, before becoming the paper’s humour columnist in 1993. He was one of the paper’s most popular columnists before retiring from the position in 2008 to work exclusively on books. In 2004, he launched his mystery series about an anxiety-ridden, know-it-all, pain-in-the-butt father by the name of Zack Walker. Bad Move, the first book, was followed by three more Zack Walker thrillers: Bad Guys, Lone Wolf, and Stone Rain. (The last two were published in the UK under the titles Bad Luck and Bad News.) His first standalone thriller, No Time for Goodbye, was published in 2007 to critical acclaim and great international success. The following year, it was a Richard and Judy Summer Read selection in the UK, and did seven straight weeks at #1 on the UK bestseller list, and finished 2008 as the top selling novel of the year there. The book has since been sold around the world and been translated into nearly thirty languages. Barclay was born in the United States but moved to Canada just before turning four years old when his father, a commercial artist whose illustrations of cars appeared in Life, Look and Saturday Evening Post (before photography took over), accepted a position with an advertising agency north of the border. Barclay, who graduated with an English literature degree from Trent University, in Peterborough, Ontario, was fortunate to have some very fine mentors; in particular, the celebrated Canadian author Margaret Laurence, whom Linwood first met when she served as writer-in-residence at Trent, and Kenneth Millar, who, under the name Ross Macdonald, wrote the acclaimed series of mystery novels featuring detective Lew Archer. It was at Trent that he met Neetha, the woman who would become his wife. They have two grown children, Spencer and Paige.
