Take Your Breath Away

pparently readers either love or hate Linwood Barclay. I am in the former camp and was impressed with Parting Shot, which was published in 2017. The question for me in coming to Take Your Breath Away was whether he’d maintained that standard or mis-fired with this latest effort.

Andrew Mason's wife, Brie, disappeared six years ago and many believed that he was responsible for her murder. A body was never found though and, despite the reluctance of investigating officer Marissa Hardy, the case against him was abandoned. She has remained relentless in her efforts to hold Andrew to account.

Andrew lost work, moved, changed his name and sought refuge in alcohol for quite some time. In due course, he got his life back together and is now living with Jayne in a healthy and steady relationship. Jayne's younger teenage brother, Tyler, is also part of the family mix. Perhaps unwisely, Andrew has not shared his history with Jayne. When he eventually does, she advises him that she is pregnant.

A woman appears at Andrew's former marital home and makes a sufficient scene to be spotted by Max, a neighbour, who suspects that the woman is Brie. She promptly hurries off. Max calls both Andrew and the police to advise them of his suspicion. There are further apparent sightings of Brie, including by several of her family members from a hospital window. They are there visiting Brie's mother, Elizabeth, who is cancer-ridden and not expected to live for long.

Unhelpfully – although it's great for the story – efforts to corroborate the view that the woman is Brie fall flat. Images gleaned from CCTV footage are grainy and the woman's car registration plates are muddied to prevent identification.

Andrew delivers his story in the first person while other chapters are told in third person accounts, pretty much on an alternating basis. This form of delivery works well and does not adversely impact the story's flow.

A story without dysfunctional families and relationships can lack colour, but we don't have that problem here. Most of the characters carry baggage and that includes Brie’s extended family members, Andrew’s best friend and former business partner Greg, and even Andrew’s new life partner Jayne, and her brother. Brie’s family members, who we see most of, are divided over whether they hold Andrew responsible for her disappearance. The family matriarch, Elizabeth, however, believes she saw Brie too and has seen fit to befriend Andrew anew.

There are twists and turns aplenty and no shortage of red herrings. Loading a novel with a wide cast of characters also keeps us on our toes, but I don’t think Barclay overplays the numbers to create confusion. I carried suspicions throughout, but they were more from guesswork rather than anything surrendered by the author in his telling of the tale. There is a final twist to really rock the boat, but I think it was well-managed.

The test for me was going to be whether there was a viable explanation for why someone had disappeared for six years. Either of the two most likely scenarios – whether she had genuinely re-surfaced or whether she was still missing or dead, with an impostor in the equation – would raise a number of major questions. I think Barclay came up with an acceptable scenario, but drew in quite a number of unlikely elements to make it all come together.  

So, with his latest, Barclay provides a great deal of intrigue and really challenges the reader to work out what is going on. He uses a lot of licence with his plot ingredients but delivers a good mystery that had me hooked from start to finish.