Stephanie Jones: Book Review - No Safe House by Linwood Barclay

No Safe House is an apt title for Linwood Barclay’s sequel to his 2008 bestseller No Time for Goodbye. In that story, Cynthia Archer learned the 25-year-old truth about the disappearance of her parents and sibling, thanks in part to the role of one Vince Fleming, who crops up again in the novel that resumes the action seven years on. Cynthia should be living a quiet, peaceful life, but the scars of her teenage trauma haven’t faded. As it turns out, she has good reason to be paranoid and anxious, for Barclay has constructed quite the inventive crime ring in her middle-class neighbourhood.

That serious crims are at work is evidenced in a prologue in which an elderly couple is killed during a home invasion. Then the body of a young man turns up and is linked to an address in the same street. Barclay’s plot exposition is steady rather than artful, as Cynthia, prompted by an altercation with her 15-year-old daughter Grace, decamps to an apartment nearby and husband and father Terry is left to clean up the mess Grace gets into shortly afterwards when she follows a classmate to a stranger’s house to ‘borrow’ a Porsche and things go predictably awry.

The story plays out with the directness and ease of the practiced crime writer, characters introduced and their motives – some more clear than others – examined. Detective Rona Wedmore is on the murder cases and shows every sign of having the moxie to crack them. Cynthia’s new home is abutted by the apartments of an elderly man with dementia and a former Young Turk in business who had a nervous breakdown and now supports himself by walking dogs, his shiny Cadillac the only connection to his past life. Encountering Vince via Cynthia may not bolster his recovery.

Vince, an individual of some complexity who vastly outweighs the other characters in the interest stakes, is tied to the Archer family not only through their shared history; his stepdaughter Jane, a former student of Terry’s from the wrong side of the tracks, has become an unexpected confidante to Grace.

There’s a fair bit of bad blood between the adults owing to the fact that Vince took a bullet in the course of helping the Archers and now lives with an ostomy bag. His disability hasn’t stopped him founding a commendably creative if high-risk racket that he runs with the aid of “Vince’s guys”, a crew of misfits that resembles a felonious version of the Keystone Kops. In contrast with the brutal opening scene, their fate is more comical than affecting.

As a straightforward crime thriller, No Safe House plays out in a series of conversations – Terry, from whose perspective the story is told, does love to chat – interrupted by occasional bouts of action. It’s a paint-by numbers story of greed versus good that doesn’t rank among Barclay’s more inspired works, but for readers curious about what became of those Archers it provides a definitive answer. They’ll need a new housekeeper, though.