Fear the worst

Title: Fear the Worst

Author: Linwood Barclay

Number of pages: 368

Started: 7 April 2010

Finished: 13 April 2010

Opening words:

The morning of the day I lost her, my daughter asked me to scramble her some eggs. “Want bacon with it?" I shouted upstairs, where she was still getting ready for work.

To find out if she wants bacon and to read more here
Plot summary:

The worst day of Tim Blake's life started out with him making breakfast for his seventeen-year-old daughter Sydney. Syd was staying with him while she worked a summer job - even if he wasn't entirely sure what her job at the Just Inn Time motel actually was - and Tim hoped this quality father-daughter time would somehow help her deal with his divorce. When she didn't arrive home at her usual time, he thought she'd probably gone to the mall to hang with her friends. When she didn't answer her phone he began to worry. When she didn't come home at all, he began to panic. And when the people at the Just Inn Time said they had no Sydney Blake working at the motel and never had, he began to see his life going into freefall. If she hadn't been working at the Just Inn Time every day, what had she been doing? Something she couldn't - or wouldn't - tell her own father about? To find his daughter Tim doesn't need to simply track her down - he needs to know who she really was, and what could have made her step out of her own life without leaving a trace. Only one thing has him convinced the worst hasn't already happened: the fact that some very scary people seem just as eager as he is to find her. The question is: who's going to find her first?

What I thought:

This was a decent thriller. It was a fairly fast moving read, with a few twists that were possible to foresee, but mainly one that encouraged you to keep turning the pages. I don’t really tend to read crime novels anymore, but Linwood Barclay’s books are quite light reads and ones that are a decent distraction from some novels that are perhaps more hard work to plough through. It was also good to have a book that wasn’t entirely sewn up in some warm and fussy happy ending.