“Cosiness is pulled down by the officious moralising”
“Linwood Barclay can do better than ”the Lie””
“the Canadian Linwood Barclay is a former columnist and humorist, and it shows. His crime novels are, for example, spiced up with galghumoristiska insights into today’s tidningsvärld. One of the main characters in the Lie, the journalist David Harwood, may suffer to reports from the city council outsourced via the link to India, and to the redaktörstjänst which he imagined was important never added when he left it.”
“Barclay has a warm, laconic sense of the småstadsmedelklass who have decent social status and a certain cultural capital, but hardly any larger amounts of money in the bank.”
“His central characters can be everything from car dealerships to private investigators, but the best is he at the teacher and journalisttyper whose pathos and ambition in middle age grumsats of a hefty pinch of disillusion. So far, they have always been men, but I forgive it because they are so well-portrayed in its human imperfection.”
“snatched out of the weekly routines and thrown into the typical mardrömsscenarier. Teenage daughters disappear, babies are kidnapped, wives turns out to be some completely other than they gave themselves out to be. The course of events is unpredictable, Barclay increase cleverly the tension – you can understand what a trauma it was when I once forgot one of his novels, as I was in the middle of, on a train in Germany.”
“We’re talking about one of my favorite authors in the kriminalgenren. I can particularly recommend two novels: Believe your eyes, where a schizophrenic discovering a murder in a street scene on a kartsajt, and Misled, where a woman disappears from an amusement park. “
“Lie, the second, independent part of a trilogy that takes place in Promise Falls, is unfortunately not as good. Promise Falls is a classic Barclay-land, but now he develops the small community to its own counterpart to Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple-the village of St. Mary Mead, or Caroline Graham’s Midsomer. “
“the Throng of people and handlingsspår involving deadly sabotage at a drive in cinema, a secret sexgrotta of a författareu002Fföre this criminal biker, a corrupt universitetsanställd, a shameless candidacy, a pervert former madam, a couple of struggling solitary moms and so the novel’s hedersknyfflar: a police officer and a private investigator.”
“There is a lot to keep track of, and to top it all lags a couple of old cases from the last book in the trilogy, the Betrayal.”
“The literary style is still strong enough and personal to – on your hair – to hold together the story, but pleasant move, which always balances the horrors Barclay has adopted an easy officious tone. Group sex is depicted as a slippery slope toward abuse, the depraved are set against a small town helylletrupp. People are dying like flies, and, together with the moralismen makes it Midsomer-emotional unknare aspects quite sickening.”