“A Tap on the Window” by Linwood Barclay – Weaver of Fates

A Tap on the Window by Linwood Barclay is what I like to refer to as a good old detective murder mystery; the author doesn’t try any fancy tricks, and rather delivers us a compelling story with plenty enough twists and turns to keep us guessing.

Just to give you a run-down of the plot, it follows private investigator Cal Weaver as one night he picks up a hitchhiking teenage girl, Claire Saunders.

Unfortunately, he becomes drawn deep into Claire’s life, and on the next day finds himself as the number one suspect for the murder of Claire’s friend. From there on out, Weaver starts to unravel the dark side of this seemingly idyllic little town while searching for Claire in hopes of clearing himself and finally getting some answers.

As mentioned in the beginning, the plot is on the simple side, though that doesn’t take anything away from it. It is quite easy to follow, and even experienced mystery readers will find some of the twists surprising and hard to predict.

Though at first things may seem confusing as we are fed seemingly unrelated pieces of the whole puzzle, as the story goes on the plot makes more and more sense, culminating in a memorable climax where all is revealed.

For a detective novel the characters are surprisingly inspired, each of them being vividly described and given at least some measure of depth. This contributes to making the story more believable and even allows the reader to become emotionally-invested in it with greater ease.

Though the book may be 500 pages long, Barclay still manages to maintain a frantic pace, to the point where I found myself turning one page after the next faster than I could count them.

It ought to be mentioned that those of you who read some of Barclay’s earlier novels should not expect his trademark humor to be found here. Indeed, A Tap on the Window is one of his more serious novels, and the lack of comic relief really helps to maintain an atmosphere of constant danger and tension.

All in all, I have to say that even though it is far from being anything groundbreaking, A Tap on the Window is definitely a solid mystery novel, one worth reading for all fans of the genre.

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Linwood Barclay Personal site Known by most people out there as a humorist, Linwood Barclay has had a number of different lines of work in his life, but judging from recent events, it seems he settled on author more than anything else. And that’s a good thing too as he has a real knack for it, giving life to widely-acclaimed novels such as A Tap on the Window and Too Close to Home.