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The Accident: A Thriller, by Linwood Barclay
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Glen Garber, a contractor, has seen his business shaken by the housing crisis, and now his wife, Sheila, is taking a business course at night to increase her chances of landing a good-paying job. But she should have been home by now. With their eight-year-old daughter sleeping soundly, Glen soon finds his worst fears confirmed: Sheila and two others have been killed in a car accident. Grieving and in denial, Glen resolves to investigate the accident himself—and begins to uncover layers of lawlessness beneath the placid surface of their Connecticut suburb, secret after dangerous secret behind the closed doors. Propelled into a vortex of corruption and illegal activity, pursued by mysterious killers, and confronted by threats from neighbors he thought he knew, Glen must take his own desperate measures and go to terrifying new places in himself to avenge his wife and protect his child.
- Sales Rank: #111539 in Books
- Brand: Bantam
- Published on: 2012-03-27
- Released on: 2012-03-27
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.48" h x 1.13" w x 4.15" l, .58 pounds
- Binding: Mass Market Paperback
- 480 pages
- Great product!
Review
“If you like Harlan Coben, you’ll love Linwood Barclay.”—Peter Robinson, author of Bad Boy
Praise for Linwood Barclay’s Never Look Away
“The writing is crisp; the twists are jolting and completely unexpected.”—Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly
“Fast-paced and with an irresistible blend of suspense and tension.”—Tucson Citizen
About the Author
Linwood Barclay is a former columnist for the Toronto Star. He is the #1 internationally bestselling author of nine critically acclaimed novels, including The Accident, Never Look Away, Fear the Worst, Too Close to Home, and No Time for Goodbye. Multiple titles have been optioned for film. He lives near Toronto with his wife and has two grown children. He is currently at work on his latest thriller, to be published by Bantam in Summer 2012.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
ONE
If I'd known this was our last morning, I'd have rolled over in bed and held her. But of course, if it had been possible to know something like that--if I could have somehow seen into the future--I wouldn't have let go. And then things would have been different.
I'd been staring at the ceiling for a while when I finally threw back the covers and planted my feet on the hardwood floor.
"How'd you sleep?" Sheila asked as I rubbed my eyes. She reached out and touched my back.
"Not so good. You?"
"Off and on."
"I sensed you were awake, but I didn't want to bug you, on the off chance you were sleeping," I said, glancing over my shoulder. The sun's first rays of the day filtered through the drapes and played across my wife's face as she lay in bed, looking at me. This wasn't a time of day when people looked their best, but there was something about Sheila. She was always beautiful. Even when she looked worried, which was how she looked now.
I turned back around, looked down at my bare feet. "I couldn't get to sleep for the longest time, then I think I finally nodded off around two, but then I looked at the clock and it was five. Been awake since then."
"Glen, it's going to be okay," Sheila said. She moved her hand across my back, soothing me.
"Yeah, well, I'm glad you think so."
"Things'll pick up. Everything goes in cycles. Recessions don't last forever."
I sighed. "This one sure seems to. After these jobs I'm doing now, we got nothin' lined up. Some nibbles, did a couple of estimates last week--one for a kitchen, one to finish off a basement--but they haven't called back."
I stood up, turned and said, "What's your excuse for staring at the ceiling all night?"
"Worried about you. And . . . I've got things on my mind, too."
"What?"
"Nothing," she said quickly. "I mean, just the usual. This course I'm taking, Kelly, your work."
"What's wrong with Kelly?"
"Nothing's wrong with her. I'm a mother. She's eight. I worry. It's what I do. When I've done the course, I can help you more. That'll make a difference."
"When you made the decision to take it, we had the business to justify it. Now, I don't know if I'll even have any work for you to do," I said. "I just hope I have enough to keep Sally busy."
Sheila'd started her business accounting course mid-August, and two months in was enjoying it more than she'd expected. The plan was for Sheila to do the day-to-day accounts for Garber Contracting, the company that was once my father's, and which I now ran. She could even do it from home, which would allow Sally Diehl, our "office girl," to focus more on general office management, returning phone calls, hounding suppliers, fielding customer inquiries. There usually wasn't time for Sally to do the accounting, which meant I was bringing it home at night, sitting at my desk until midnight. But with work drying up, I didn't know how this was all going to shake down.
"And now, with the fire--"
"Enough," Sheila said.
"Sheila, one of my goddamn houses burned down. Please don't tell me everything's going to be fine."
She sat up in bed and crossed her arms across her breasts. "I'm not going to let you get all negative on me. This is what you do."
"I'm just telling you how it is."
"And I'm going to tell you how it will be," she said. "We will be okay. Because this is what we do. You and I. We get through things. We find a way." She looked away for a moment, like there was something she wanted to say but wasn't sure how to say it. Finally, she said, "I have ideas."
"What ideas?"
"Ideas to help us. To get us through the rough patches."
I stood there, my arms open, waiting.
"You're so busy, so wrapped up in your own problems--and I'm not saying that they aren't big problems--that you haven't even noticed."
"Noticed what?" I asked.
She shook her head and smiled. "I got Kelly new outfits for school."
"Okay."
"Nice ones."
I narrowed my eyes. "What are you getting at?"
"I've made some money."
I thought I already knew that. Sheila had her part-time job at Hardware Depot--about twenty hours a week--working the checkout. They'd recently installed these new self-checkout stations people couldn't figure out, so there was still work there for Sheila until they did. And since the early summer, Sheila had been helping our next-door neighbor--Joan Mueller--with her own books for a business she was running from her home. Joan's husband, Ely, had been killed on that oil rig off the coast of Newfoundland when it blew up about a year back. She'd been getting jerked around by the oil company on her settlement, and in the meantime had started running a daycare operation. Every morning four or five preschoolers got dropped off at her door. And on school days when Sheila was working, Kelly went to Joan's until one of us got home. Sheila had helped Joan organize a bookkeeping system to keep track of what everyone owed and had paid. Joan loved kids, but could barely finger count.
"I know you've been making some money," I said. "Joan, and the store. Everything helps."
"Those two jobs together don't keep us in Hamburger Helper. I'm talking about better money than that."
My eyebrows went up. Then I got worried. "Tell me you're not taking money from Fiona." Her mother. "You know how I feel about that."
She looked insulted. "Jesus, Glen, you know I would never--"
"I'm just saying. I'd rather you were a drug dealer than taking money from your mother."
She blinked, threw back the covers abruptly, got out of bed, and stalked into the bathroom. The door closed firmly behind her.
"Aw, come on," I said.
By the time we reached the kitchen, I didn't think she was angry with me anymore. I'd apologized twice, and tried to coax from Sheila details of what her idea was to bring more money into the house.
"We can talk about it tonight," she said.
We hadn't washed the dishes from the night before. There were a couple of coffee cups, my scotch glass, and Sheila's wine goblet, with a dark red residue at the bottom, sitting in the sink. I lifted the goblet onto the counter, worried the stem might break if other things got tossed into the sink alongside it.
The wineglass made me think of Sheila's friends.
"You seeing Ann for lunch or anything?" I asked.
"No."
"I thought you had something set up."
"Maybe later this week. Belinda and Ann and me might get together, although every time we do that I have to get a cab home and my head hurts for a week. Anyway, I think Ann's got some physical or something today, an insurance thing."
"She okay?"
"She's fine." A pause. "More or less."
"What's that mean?"
"I don't know. I think there's some kind of tension there, between her and Darren. And between Belinda and George, for that matter."
"What's going on?"
"Who knows," she said.
"So then, what are you doing today? You don't have a shift today, right? If I can slip away, you want to get lunch? I was thinking something fancy, like that guy who sells hot dogs by the park."
"I've got my course tonight," she said. "Some errands to run, and I might visit Mom." She shot me a look. "Not to ask her for money."
"Okay." I decided to ask nothing further. She'd tell me when she was ready.
Kelly walked into the room at the tail end of the conversation. "What's for breakfast?"
"You want cereal, cereal, or cereal?" Sheila asked.
Kelly appeared to ponder her choices. "I'll take cereal," she said, and sat at the table.
At our house, breakfast wasn't a sit-down family meal like dinner. Actually, dinner often wasn't, either, especially when I got held up at a construction site, or Sheila was at work, or heading off to her class. But we at least tried to make that a family event. Breakfast was a lost cause, however. I had my toast and coffee standing, usually flattening the morning Register on the countertop and scanning the headlines as I turned the pages. Sheila was spooning in fruit and yogurt at the same time as Kelly shoveled in her Cheerios, trying to get them into herself before any of them had a chance to get soggy.
Between spoonfuls she asked, "Why would anyone go to school at night when they're grown up and don't have to go?"
"When I finish this course," Sheila told her, "I'll be able to help your father more, and that helps the family, and that helps you."
"How does that help me?" she wanted to know.
I stepped in. "Because if my company is run well, it makes more money, and that helps you."
"So you can buy me more stuff?"
"Not necessarily."
Kelly took a gulp of orange juice. "I'd never go to school at night. Or summer. You'd have to kill me to get me to go to summer school."
"If you get really good marks, that won't happen," I said, a hint of warning in my voice. We'd already had a call from her teacher that she wasn't completing all her homework.
Kelly had nothing to say to that and concentrated on her cereal. On the way out the door, she gave her mother a hug, but all I got was a wave. Sheila caught me noticing the perceived slight and said, "It's because you're a meanie."
I called the house from work mid-morning.
"Hey," Sheila said.
"You're home. I didn't know whether I'd catch you or not."
"Still here. What's up?"
"Sally's dad."
"What?"
"She was calling home from the office and when he didn't answer she took off. I just called to see how he was and he's gone."
"He's dead?"
"Yeah."
"Oh jeez. How old was he?"
"Seventy-nine, I think. He was in his late fifties when he had Sally." Sheila knew the history. The man had married a woman twenty years younger than he was, and still managed to outlive her. She'd died of an aneurysm a decade ago.
"What happened to him?"
"Don't know. I mean, he had diabetes, he'd been having heart trouble. Could have been a heart attack."
"We need to do something for her."
"I offered to drop by but she said she's got a lot to deal with right now. Funeral'll probably be in a couple of days. We can talk about it when you get back from Bridgeport." Where Sheila took her class.
"We'll do something. We've always been there for her." I could almost picture Sheila shaking her head. "Look," she said, "I'm heading out. I'll leave you and Kelly lasagna, okay? Joan's expecting her after school today and--"
"I got it. Thanks."
"For what?"
"Not giving up. Not letting things get you down."
"Just doing the best I can," she said.
"I love you. I know I can be a pain in the ass, but I love you."
"Ditto."
It was after ten. Sheila should have been home by now.
I tried her cell for the second time in ten minutes. After six rings it went to voicemail. "Hi, you've reached Sheila Garber. Sorry I missed you. Leave a message and I'll get back to you." Then the beep.
"Hey, me again," I said. "You're freaking me out. Call me."
I put the cordless receiver back onto its stand and leaned up against the kitchen counter, folded my arms. As she'd promised, Sheila had left two servings of lasagna in the fridge, for Kelly and me, each hermetically sealed under plastic wrap. I'd heated Kelly's in the microwave when we got home, and she'd come back looking for seconds, but I couldn't find a baking dish with any more in it. I might as well have offered her mine, which a few hours later still sat on the counter. I wasn't hungry.
I was rattled. Running out of work. The fire. Sally's dad.
And even if I'd managed to recover my appetite late in the evening, the fact that Sheila still wasn't home had put me on edge.
Her class, which was held at the Bridgeport Business College, had ended more than an hour and a half ago, and it was only a thirty-minute drive home. Which made her an hour late. Not that long, really. There were any number of explanations.
She could have stayed after class to have a coffee with someone. That had happened a couple of times. Maybe the traffic was bad on the turnpike. All you needed was someone with a flat tire on the shoulder to slow everything down. An accident would stop everything dead.
That didn't explain her not answering her cell, though. She'd been known to forget to turn it back on after class was over, but when that happened it went to voicemail right away. But the phone was ringing. Maybe it was tucked so far down in her purse she couldn't hear it.
I wondered whether she'd decided to go to Darien to see her mother and not made it back out to Bridgeport in time for her class. Reluctantly, I made the call.
"Hello?"
"Fiona, it's Glen."
In the background, I heard someone whisper, "Who is it, love?" Fiona's husband, Marcus. Technically speaking, Sheila's stepfather, but Fiona had remarried long after Sheila had left home and settled into a life with me.
"Yes?" she said.
I told her Sheila was late getting back from Bridgeport, and I wondered if maybe her daughter had gotten held up at her place.
"Sheila didn't come see me today," Fiona said. "I certainly wasn't expecting her. She never said anything about coming over."
That struck me as odd. When Sheila mentioned maybe going to see Fiona, I'd figured she'd already bounced the idea off her.
"Is there a problem, Glen?" Fiona asked icily. There wasn't worry in her voice so much as suspicion. As if Sheila's staying out late had more to do with me than it did with her.
"No, everything's fine," I said. "Go back to bed."
I heard soft steps coming down from the second floor. Kelly, not yet in her pajamas, wandered into the kitchen. She looked at the still-wrapped lasagna on the counter and asked, "Aren't you going to eat that?"
"Hands off," I said, thinking maybe I'd get my appetite back once Sheila was home. I glanced at the wall clock. Quarter past ten. "Why aren't you in bed?"
"Because you haven't told me to go yet," she said.
"What have you been doing?"
"Computer."
"Go to bed," I said.
From the Hardcover edition.
Most helpful customer reviews
38 of 41 people found the following review helpful.
"Fame...is no sure test of merit...it is an accident, not the property of man." Thomas Carlyle
By michael a. draper
"The Accident' is a thought provoking story dealing with the sale of knock off items by unwary suburbanites attempting to add to their family's incomes. It also details the members of organized crime behind this activity and the revelation that many of these items were made by young children working in miserable conditions in China and third world countries.
The thrilling story tells of Glen Garber becoming worried when his wife, Sheila, fails to return home from night school.
When Glen attempts to follow the route his wife would take, he comes upon an accident and sees that it is his wife's car. Rushing to the car, police stop him and he learns that his wife did not survive and that she was apparently drinking and passed out. Two people in another car were also killed in the accident.
One of Sheila's friends, Ann Slocum, is ordered to meet an unnamed man who wants his money. We learn that Ann had been selling unregistered pharmaceutical products. Ann meets someone and there is a dispute ending with her death.
Glen has lost so much, there has been a fire in a home he was building and the investigation shows that the cause was shoddy equipment. With his business problems, Sheila's death and children at Glen's daughter Kelly's school treating her cruely, he seems surrounded by people intent on harming him and Kelly. He is a most sympathetic character who we come to admire because he doesn't ask for sympathy or give up after having his world crumble around him.
Barclay has written a riveting book about a man who demonstrates how one man, acting with conviction, can make a difference.
This was an easy read but the reader should cancel all of their appointments before starting the story because once they begin, they won't be able to stop reading.
I enjoyed the fully developed characters and found myself holding my breath in parts of the book, saying "Oh No!" and in other parts cheering for Glen's success.
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful.
A mesmerizing and literate escape from the onset of the autumn months
By Bookreporter
Linwood Barclay is the master, not to mention the innovator, of the suburban thriller. He has written an admirable and enviable string of books dealing with those among the well-off who, in the words of Lewis Carroll, must run as fast as they can to stay in place, and what happens when some very strange and unexpected sand gets in the gears. Where Barclay has stepped it up a notch or three in book after book has been with the mystery element of his novels, which, not coincidentally, have become darker and darker with each successive offering.
"If you are looking for a mesmerizing and literate escape from the onset of the autumn months, you need look no further than THE ACCIDENT."
THE ACCIDENT, Barclay's newest book, continues the upward trajectory established by its predecessors. He begins with a truism that is not necessarily unusual in thriller literature: everyone has secrets. In this world, as in ours, it's those little common ones that get you into trouble: fudging on taxes; missing payments on bills; or living beyond means, either by carelessness or by necessity. At a certain point, reality rears its head and one needs to do something drastic, which invariably makes things worse. So it is that THE ACCIDENT deals with the scenario of what happens when the honey wagon loses a wheel and dumps its load, and then some, in the front yard.
Glen Garber, the owner of a small but successful construction company, is having difficulties, what with a soft economy and an employee and a subcontractor who seem to be going off the rails in different directions. A fire that all but destroys one of his construction projects may well put him awash in red ink as well. Those problems, though, pale in comparison to what occurs on a night, no different from any other, when his wife, Sheila, is late returning from an evening business class. Glen and his semi-precocious eight-year-old daughter, Kelly, go looking for her and are horrified when they come across an accident that has left her and members of another family dead. As if this loss was not enough, it appears that Sheila caused the accident as the result of her driving while intoxicated. Such behavior would be totally uncharacteristic of her, so the circumstances, in addition to the loss itself, leave Glen reeling and befuddled.
Within a couple of weeks, a good friend of Sheila's, and the mother of Kelly's best friend, dies as well, in what appears to be a freak accident. Glen's hackles go up. It develops that Sheila did not attend her business class on the night she died. She had a mysterious envelope that she was supposed to deliver, but never did. Now someone wants that envelope very badly and thinks Glen has it. Glen remembers that on the morning she died, Sheila told him, "I have ideas. Ideas to help us. To get us through the rough patches." He is beginning to wonder what those ideas were, and what she was involved in when she died. Glen is curious, but most of all is angry. As more secrets are revealed, Glen is less and less sure of who he can --- and should --- trust. Little does he know that Kelly holds the key to at least a couple of his questions, even if it isn't the one he wants the most to be answered: Was Sheila really at fault in the accident that took her life? Or was her death an accident at all?
THE ACCIDENT is Barclay's most ambitious book to date and, not coincidentally, contains some of his best writing. There is one point, about halfway through, when Glen is on the receiving end of a couple of surprises about his wife --- one after another, boom boom --- that hit with the explosiveness of a two-by-four up the side of your head in a dark and quiet room. The hits and surprises keep on coming after that. But this is not all smoke and violence, by any means. There is one vignette where Glen begins going through the items that were in the purse that Sheila had with her on the night she died. It is one of the best pieces of writing that Barclay has ever done, which is saying something (and those of you who have read NEVER LOOK AWAY know what I mean).
If you are looking for a mesmerizing and literate escape from the onset of the autumn months, you need look no further than THE ACCIDENT.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
19 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
Strong example of the "good life gone bad" thriller genre
By RobynJC
Glen Garber, a stressed out contractor trying to keep from going under, is shattered when his loving, reliable wife kisses him goodbye one morning, heads off to business class and never comes home. She and another family are killed in a drunk driving accident - and she was the drunk driver. As Glen tries to understand how his buttoned-up wife could have been hiding her alcoholism, the rest of his suburban life continues to unravel as well. More deaths follow - his daughter is threatened -- and Glen starts to realize that his entire community is built on a foundation that's crumbling beneath.
Barclay gets a lot of comparisons to Coben, and fair enough. Both of them can set up a happy family and dismantle it in a minute, leaving both reader and protagonist reeling as we try to uncover the truth. There is a difference, though. While he's good at building up tension, Barclay just can't write like Coben (or other top tier thriller writers) can. The humor isn't as sharp, the writing is a bit lazy, and the characters less focused. Most troubling, there's a certain "trying too hard" element, as he juggles plot elements ranging from counterfeit purse parties to toxic dry wall to housewives peddling prescription drugs to lost money in Ponzi schemes. It never comes together quite as cleanly as one would hope - it's a piece of writing where the strain shows. I'll give him four stars because I'm a sucker for a fast story, and he tells one here. But the writing quality keeps him from being on par with the best in the business.
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