Too Close to Home

Title: Too Close to Home

Author: Linwood Barclay

Number of pages: 466

Started: 20 November 2009

Finished: 30 November 2009

Opening words:

Derek figured, when the time came, the crawlspace would be the best place to hide. The only thing was, he hoped the Langleys wouldn't take that long, one he was in position, to get the hell out of their house and hit the road. The last time Derek had played with Adam in their crawlspace, they'd been eight, nine years old. They'd pretend it was a cave filled with treasure or the cargo hold of a spaceship and there was a monster hiding in there somewhere.

Plot summary:

When the Cutter family's next-door-neighbours, the Langleys, are gunned down in their house one hot August night, the Cutters' world is turned upside down. That violent death should have come so close to them is shocking enough in suburban Promise Falls, but at least the Cutters can console themselves with the thought that lightning is unlikely to strike twice in the same place. Unless, of course, the killers went to the wrong house... At first the idea seems crazy - but each of the Cutter family has a secret they'd rather keep buried. What was on that old computer teenage Derek and his friend Adam Langley had salvaged? And where is it now? What hold does a local professor and bestselling author have on Ellen Cutter? And what does Jim Cutter know about Mrs Langley that even her husband didn't? To find out who killed the Langleys and why, everybody's secrets are going to have to come out. But the final secret - the secret that could save them or destroy them - is in the one place nobody would ever think of looking...

What I thought:

This book was a decent read. It wasn’t a great work of literature and I could see how various bits of the plot were going to pan out very early on, but it was readable and a reasonable plot.