TOO CLOSE TO HOME. By Linwood Barclay. Bantam. 416 pages. $22.
This is not funny. A critically acclaimed humor columnist, Linwood Barclay, quit his job with the Toronto Star last year and is now a full-time novelist. And though he garnered a lot of attention and instigated loads of laughter with his four-novel Zack Walker series, he has moved on to serious thriller writing. In this, his second stand-alone thriller, Barclay proves again that he can break free of old habits in the way that he amuses the masses with his convoluted constructs.
With Too Close to Home, Barclay has created a high-speed whodunit that will have you turning pages as fast as your eyes can garner meaning from his words. The third-person prologue introduces 17-year-old Derek Cutter as he pulls a charade to score the perfect weeklong hideaway where he and his girlfriend can engage in a bit of sexual exploration. But when vacationing neighbors unexpectedly return home -- and are shot down in cold blood -- Derek inadvertently leaves behind evidence implicating himself in the crime.
The remainder of the story is narrated by Derek's father, Jim, a lawn-care professional who not only deals with public humiliation related to his profession, but also struggles to come to terms with his wife's infidelity. Shortly after he gave up his dream of being a professional artist, his wife turned her amorous attentions to the critically acclaimed and ego-laden writer who is now her boss. Matters only worsen when Derek is imprisoned for the triple homicide and evidence surfaces suggesting that the condescending writer's great work was actually stolen from a former pupil who died under mysterious circumstances. And if that is not enough trouble, it soon becomes apparent that the neighbors' home was mistaken for the Cutter home by the killer on that fateful night. Was Jim's family the intended target? If so, why?
Each new development ramps up the suspense as Jim's resourcefulness and tenacity are pushed closer to the breaking point. But Barclay remains true to the thriller format as he tosses in a personal vendetta, threats from organized crime, a crooked politician and a well-intentioned but dim-witted cop to add problems and puzzles to the mix -- confounding Jim and all the readers who are rooting for him.
Featuring ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, Barclay's novels have been hailed as suburban fiction at its finest, and I can imagine no better description for this story. Domestic problems are as intrinsic to his characters' lives as they are for most readers, and Barclay interlaces them into the warp and weft of his stories as masterfully as a skilled weaver working intricate designs into complex tapestries. His almost exclusive use of first-person viewpoint takes us inside the minds of his protagonists and allows an economy of words not possible in other forms of scene structure. Barclay is no fan of flowery prose, choosing instead to move his plots at the faster pace that's possible with a single "I" character telling the story in his own words. This technique allows the author to allocate more attention to the creation of story structures and tension-creating devices that leave the reader no choice but to turn that next page.
■ Steven Beach is a writer who lives in Lawsonville.
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