A Tap on the Window

July 1, 2013
Early in this intricately plotted stand-alone from Arthur Ellis Award–winner Barclay (Trust Your Eyes), middle-aged PI Cal Weaver hesitates to pick up a teenage girl hitchhiking one evening outside a bar in Griffon, N.Y., just across the Canadian border. He decides to give her a ride after she says she was a friend of Cal’s teenage son, Scott, who died a few months earlier while under the influence of ecstasy. The girl, who gives only her first name, Claire, soon feels sick, so he pulls over at a burger place he knows. The girl who returns to his car resembles Claire, but is not Claire. When confronted, the second teen demands to be let out. The next day both girls are missing, and Cal feels honor bound to find them. To complicate things, Claire turns out to be Claire Sanders, the daughter of Griffon’s mayor. Barclay offers one surprise after another in a mystery that unfolds with the mundane heroism and tragedy of a local news story. Agent: Helen Heller, Helen Heller Agency (Canada).

September 1, 2013
Atmospheric tale of small-town mayhem by Toronto-based mystery writer Barclay (Trust Your Eyes, 2012, etc.). Barclay may live over the line, but he's got a fondness for upstate New York, especially that within earshot of Niagara Falls, where bad guys can dump their victims and watch them bob in the waves just for grins. It takes a certain sadistic type to do so, of course. Check: Barclay's got one. Maybe more than one, given the strong-arm ways of the local gendarmerie. The story takes off with a start from the get-go, when private investigator Cal Weaver, lost in a depressed fog since the death of his son, picks up a hitchhiker who claims to have been a friend of the boy--and perhaps more. Bad idea, picking up a young woman in the rain, but that's where that insistent tap on the window comes in, and that's where things begin to go haywire. Suffice it to say that by the end of the tale, there's a pile of bodies to account for ("You don't think he did it," says his wife of one suspect. "I don't," Cal replies. "But I've been wrong before"), and Barclay has skillfully hidden the identity of the perp behind a couple of barrels' worth of red herrings. Barclay turns in a taut procedural. His prose is often relaxed, even conversational; "It struck me that she was dressed for much colder weather than we were currently having" lacks the smart-alecky zinginess of a Raymond Chandler, but it's also exactly the sort of thing a real-live gumshoe on a cooling trail might think. A smart whodunit with satisfying twists and turns. Mystery buffs couldn't ask for more.

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August 1, 2013
When Cal Weaver spots hitchhiking teenager Claire Saunders, his instincts scream that he should just get her a cab, but Claire's vulnerability nudges the private investigator's grief over his son's recent death, and he offers to drive her home. In those few moments of Cal's grief-clouded judgment, Claire makes Cal an unwitting instrument in her intricate plot to disappear. The next day, Claire's best friend, Hanna, is found murdered after disguising herself as Claire to provide diversion for Claire's escape. When police target Cal for Hanna's murder, he knows that finding Claire and discovering why she ran is the only way to keep them both safe. The most obvious lead is the feud between the town's mayor, who is Claire's father, and the police chief over accusations of police brutality, but Cal feels he's missing something. The characters and small-town New York setting are vividly rendered, and that credibility shifts this thriller's premise from far-fetched to plausibly weird. Another success for Barclay, with unfettered storytelling, rapid pacing, and sympathetic characters primed to please hordes of eager summer readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)