Book Review: Far From True

Far From True

You know the problem with writing about crimes in a hyper-specific small town like Louise Penny's fictitious quaint village of Three Pines, or Linwood Barclay's Promise Falls, a broken town in upstate New York? These unheard off places, far away from the hubbub of the cities, may be a magnet for murder, but after a point, you are bound to run into a queer problem of not finding enough people to bump off. After all, they are no New York City or London or Los Angeles. You see what I mean? In such cases, the author might inevitably choose to either start afresh, or relocate the main character to a different city (which is one thing Lee Child's Jack Reacher series has it right, him being a drifter and all that), but Barclay, with Far From True, attempts a different tack. He brings in a bunch of protagonists from a bunch of his own novels, and lets them run amok in a satisfying thriller, which opens with a drive-in theatre screen collapse, killing four people on the spot.

But it's not just that, there are far more stranger mysteries in store - like the fact that the collapse was triggered by IEDs at precisely 23:23 hours, that 23 dead squirrels were found strung up together on a fence, that three bloody mannequins were left hanging from car 23 of an abandoned ferris-wheel, that a man wearing a hoodie with the number 23 was accused of sexual assault, that an out-of-control bus with the number 23 on the back was set ablaze, and that all these events were happening around the Memorial Day weekend, which is.. May 23. By the end of it all, we are left none the wiser as to who might be running the sick show. (Barclay's next and final novel in the series The Twenty-Three, which arrives this November, should hopefully clear things a bit!) But suffice to say, the screen collapse deaths sets off a separate train of events, complete with its own set of twists and turns galore that should keep you satisfied until the next one arrives. Best read as a series, duh!