Book Review: Trust Your Eyes by Linwood Barclay
Written by Graeme McGaw
While I read a lot of books, there are only a few authors who I trust blindly. For many new books I will look up the reviews on a website like Amazon first, and get a general idea of what the public conception is on that book. There are numerous authors who for every 2 quality books will release 1 stinker, or an author gets carried away with a political statement or opinion and it ends up ruining the book.
My list of authors I blindly trust is very small – 6 authors in total. It includes the likes of Joseph Finder, Lee Child and Linwood Barclay. These are authors whose books I eagerly anticipate as soon as they are announced. I usually pre-order them as soon as Amazon offer the option, and spend the months to their release in eager anticipation.
Hell, I’ll even plan my life around it. Linwood Barclays new book “Trust Your Eyes” was released on September 4th, 2012 to North America. I was planning to travel to Europe in late August and I purposefully planned my return trip back to Canada so that I would be flying back on September 4th, and be able to read Trust Your Eyes on the plane ride home.
Of course to paraphrase Uncle Ben in Spiderman, “With great expectation comes great disappointment.”
It’s just like Christmas. The anticipation is often a lot better and more fun than the actual day. So with a trip built around the release of Linwood Barclays new thriller, I had to admit I was wondering if this would be the one. The first Linwood Barclay book where the anticipation was actually more enjoyable than the novel.
It wasn’t.
Not even a little bit.
Trust Your Eyes is an absolutely fantastic and incredibly engrossing story. The premise of the book is relatively simple – there is a schizophrenic man who spends all his time on his computer using “Whirl360.com” – which is basically Google Maps Street View. He travels everywhere on it, analyzing everything. All because he believes he is being “told to” by a former president.
And then he witnesses a murder.
If you’ve ever read a Linwood Barclay book, then you know this is just the tip of the iceberg. That brief synopsis doesn’t even begin to cover it. There are many more stories and mysteries going on, and just when you think you’ve got it all figured out – something completely different happens that keeps you turning those pages while uttering “just one more chapter”.
The story itself is fantastic – you get so caught up in this fictional world that it is so easy to close your eyes and picture it. There are no loose ends either – it’s an incredible story that will no doubt leave you more than satisfied.
However it’s the writing, and the little things, that really stick out to me. Linwood manages to craft the story in such a clever way – if you sat down and tried to jot it all out on a whiteboard it’d look like something that Matt Damon from Good Will Hunting could only solve. But Barclay manages to write in such a brilliant manner that it all flows wonderfully, and all comes together at the end.
There was one detail in particular – a minute detail mentioned briefly at the beginning and then never mentioned again…until near the end of the book, where it plays a big part in the climax. It was such a small thing, but I literally put my Kindle down and started applauding. It was just such a little thing that played out so well. It’s that little attention to detail that really make Barclays books stand out.
The book is called Trust Your Eyes and I highly recommend you do that – trust the eyes that you used to read this review, and pick up Linwood Barclays latest book immediately.