Linwood Barclay (born 1955) is an American-born Canadian author. Although he started out doing humorous non-fiction, he's really made a name for himself as a thriller writer, particularly with No Time for Goodbye which became a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic.
His novels
- Bad Move (2004)
- Bad Guys (2005)
- Lone Wolf (2006)
- Stone Rain (2007)
- No Time for Goodbye (2007)
- Too Close to Home (2008)
- Fear the Worst (2009)
- Never Look Away (2010)
- The Accident (2011)
- Clouded Vision (2011)
- Trust Your Eyes (2012)
- Never Saw it Coming (2013)
- A Tap on the Window (2013)
- No Safe House (2014)
- Broken Promise (2015)
- Final Assignment (2015)
- Far From True (2016)
- The Twenty Three (2016)
- Parting Shot (2017)
- Chase (2017)
- Escape (2018)
- A Noise Downstairs (2018)
- Elevator Pitch (2019)
- Find You First (2021)
- Take Your Breath Away (2022)
- Look Both Ways (2022)
- The Lie Maker (2023)
Tropes in his novels:
- Dark and Troubled Past: Hoo boy. Quite a few characters have this one big time. Cynthia Archer in No Time for Goodbye probably takes the prize (her parents and her brother all disappeared without a trace when she was 14), but there are plenty of other contenders.
- Donut Mess with a Cop: Taken to extremes with Detective Barry Duckworth of the Promise Falls Police Department.
- Intrepid Reporter: David Harwood has shades of this, even though the newspaper he works for, the Promise Falls Standard, gets closed down.
- Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: Sperm donation, or more pertinently the long-term consequences of this, drives the plot of both Fear the Worst (in which the narrator finds that he actually has another daughter, in addition to the one he had with his wife) and Find You First (in which a terminally-ill tech millionaire finds that his nine biological children, all of whom were conceived with sperm that he donated years ago, are being killed off one by one).
- Mistaken for Murderer: Happens to quite a few characters, most notably David Harwood, whose wife Jan disappears at the start of Never Look Away (which he narrates). Naturally, the police suspect that he had a hand in this. In a later novel, Take Your Breath Away, Andy Mason is also suspected of having murdered his wife Brie after she vanishes without a trace.
- Phony Psychic: Keisha Ceylon, who approaches the Archer family to try and explain what happened to Cynthia's family in No Time for Goodbye, is one of these; she watches the news for stories of missing family members, gives it a few days, then approaches the family and says she's had a vision and may be able to help, but she'd like some money up front. She later becomes the focus of the novella Clouded Vision, which Barclay subsequently expanded into Never Saw it Coming — in which Keisha's latest mark, a man whose wife has just disappeared, thinks that her "vision" is a little too close to the truth...
- Recurring Character: Several, as befits Barclay's use of the Shared Universe trope. David Harwood and Cal Weaver, both narrators of more than one novel, are the most prominent examples.
- Secret Other Family: The premise at the centre of No Time for Goodbye, the novel that sent Barclay to the top of the best-seller lists internationally. Cynthia, narrator Terry Archer's wife, has always been haunted by the disappearance of her mother, father and brother when she was 14. Turns out, her father had one of these...
- Shared Universe: A fair few of his novels are set in the same universe — which is centred on the seemingly nice and peaceful but actually quite troubled town of Promise Falls in upstate New York which serves as a deconstruction of The American Dream. Three novels — Broken Promise, Far From True and The Twenty Three — form the "Promise Falls Trilogy". Parting Shot then follows on directly from the events of those novels.
- Struggling Single Mother: Recurring character David Harwood is a male example following the death of his wife at the end of Never Look Away, which left him to raise his son on his own. He's also out of work (as the newspaper for which he was a reporter closed down) and is forced to move back in with his parents in order to make ends meet.
- Trumplica: Promise Falls has a disgraced ex-mayor who attempts a political comeback by knowingly rebranding himself as a local version of the Donald.
- What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: In-universe, recurring character David Harwood invokes this trope when he has to speak to his mother about how she should not let his young son watch Family Guy when she's looking after him, as it's not suitable for children (she, being older, assumes that it's suitable for children purely because it's a cartoon).
