Trust Your Eyes by Linwood Barclay

Linwood Barclay is a hugely successful author.  His back catalogue include his memoir Last Resort, a series of comic thrillers featuring the character Zach Walker and seven very popular stand-alone novels.

The first of these stand-alones is No Time For Goodbye which was the single bestselling novel in the UK in 2008, and has been optioned for a movie.

Linwood Barclay's latest release Trust Your Eyes will be published in the UK by Orion on 27 September 2012.

Trust Your Eyes hooked me in  from the first sentence, with a prologue that is intriguing and taunts the reader with snippets of what is yet to come.

Ray and Thomas Kilbride are two brothers and very different characters.   Thomas spends his days in his room, memorising city maps from all over the world.  He is addicted to the website Whirl360 - a site that allows the user to visit anywhere in the world from the comfort of their own home.   Thomas does nothing but this, except eat, take his medication and make very infrequent trips to his psychiatrist.   Thomas is working secretly for the CIA, and speaks regularly to ex President Bill Clinton .... or does he?

Ray is an illustrator, he moved away some time age, but is now home trying to sort out the family home and what to do about Thomas after the accidental death of their father .... or what it an accident?

When Whirl360 throws up something suspicious looking in a random window, on a random street in New York, Thomas is convinced that there has been a murder.  The Kilbride brothers find themselves smack bang in the middle of a deadly conspiracy game, being played out by some powerful, and very dangerous people.

Linwood Barclay

Trust Your Eyes is a multi-layered, complicated thriller, told in an accessible and totally uncomplicated way.  The suspense is taut right from the beginning, the pace is furious, the tension is often unrelenting.

There are enough red herrings thrown at the reader to start a stall on a fish market, and just when you think you've worked something out Linwood Barclay throws another spanner into the works.

I certainly had every one of my theories blown way way out of the window as I was reading, which only keeps up the level of suspense right up until the very last sentence.

The different threads of the story are effortlessly tied together, the characters are scarily life like.  The issues of mental illness is dealt with sensitively, yet conveys the frustration that can be caused to family members, and also the devastation at times.

Linwood Barclay is a master at suspenseful and thrilling writing, I enjoyed this novel immensely and thank Real Readers for the opportunity to read and review an advance copy.

You can see the trailer for Trust Your Eyes here.   Linwood Barclay has a website, and you can follow him on Twitter here.