Trust Your Eyes

There is an unexpected perk to working at Barnes & Noble, one that I take great pleasure in.  Once a week, at least, a couple copies of books will be lying on the breakroom tables that are free for employees to take, at a first-come, first-served basis.  Advanced copies.

Now, most of these books hold no interest for me.  Often, they're some lame romance (not knocking the romance genre, understand, but the books themselves look lame) or they're some boring modernist affair that I will never remember.  I'm happy to leave those for somebody else.

Once in a while, though, a jewel shows up.  Trust Your Eyes by Linwood Barclay is a thriller coming out in September (and I got to read it before all of you!)

This is not your typical thriller.  Not a whole lot of gunplay that goes on here.  In fact, this is really two separate stories that happen to collide towards the end.

The first story is a low-key family drama about two brothers, Ray and Thomas Kilbride.  Their father has just died in a lawnmower accident and Ray has moved in with his brother temporarily to help take care of things.  Thomas needs the help, too, because he has schizophrenic and obsessive tendencies, the latter being shown by his map obsession.  He spends all day, every day, on his computer playing around with his Whirl360, a computer program with pictures of every street across the world.  Thomas memorizes everything that is on there, every street, every store, building, all in the "service of the CIA" for when "all the computers in the world shut down and they lose all virtual maps."  Naturally, Ray is out of his league trying to help his brother behave like a normal human being, or at least a functional one, and easing him off his paranoid delusions.

At the same time, Ray is noticing some odd circumstances regarding his father's accident and is wondering whether it was really so accidental.

The other story is a murder conspiracy that goes wrong.  Allison Fitch, a bartender months behind on all her bills, sees something interesting about an upcoming governor election and realizes that blackmail is a lovely way to settle her debts.  Which seems to go well until the folks she's blackmailing decide to put a hit on her.  It all goes crazy from there.

I don't want to reveal too much else about that story because it thrives on surprise.  I had a lot of fun seeing what would happen next.

These two separate tales do collide when Thomas, on his Whirl360 tour, sees a disturbing image linked to the conspirators.  Down to the last page, I found this book hard to put down.

It's a fun read.  I'll happily recommend it.