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Linwood Barclay is well known to Canadian readers by virtue of his Toronto Star newspaper column, as well as a number of nonfiction books he has published. BAD MOVE is his first work of fiction. It is a quirky yet appealing work with which a number of readers will identify, undoubtedly making Barclay a well-known commodity on this side of the border as well.
BAD MOVE defies easy categorization, and bless Barclay for that. It is a mystery, yes, but there is a vein of humor that runs wide and deep through it. I was put in the mind of Donald Westlake in more than a couple of spots, although Barclay seems to have wanted to write a gently cautionary tale as well; if he did, he has succeeded.
The Walker family is living in the big city and finds that their comfortable neighborhood is falling, falling down before their eyes. Drug dealers plying their trade, punks on the street corners, hookers on the streets ... things are simply not as they were.
Zack Walker, husband and father to his ungrateful and unappreciative family, is a science fiction writer of some minor renown who seems to spend more time off of the keyboard than on it. Walker is a bit of a safety and security freak, in a family of devil-may cares. He has some insight into his extremes. I was somewhat unsettled to discover him playing tricks on his family to make them observe some basic security rules (locking the door, keeping objects off of the stairs) that I have done with my own family.
Walker, fed up with the deterioration of his neighborhood, gets the idea to move to the suburbs. His wife is initially against it, but after a trip to Valley Forest Estates in the town of Oakwood she is eventually won over (the item that tips her over favoring the move had me howling and is all too true). The Walkers pack up and move. Everything seems to be placid and quiet (and, to the children, maybe a little too quiet), the perfect balm for the afflictions that caused the Walkers to leave in the first place. Except that ... it's not. The builder does not seem interested in complying with the warranty, the family can't eat those great cannolis they used to get in their own neighborhood --- and then, there's the dead body.
Walker, while out for a morning walk, discovers a local tree-hugging activist dead under very suspicious circumstances, made all the more suspicious due to the fact that he and the local developer were often literally at each other's throats. When yet another safety trick of Walker's backfires very dramatically on him, he finds that in the short course of an afternoon and evening he has placed his family in greater danger than they faced in their former urban environs. The law of unintended consequences is in full bore here, as Walker races against time and the bad guys to save his family from a danger he has unleashed upon himself and them.
While parts of BAD MOVE are hilarious, it is by turns very grim and graphic as well. Not every reader is going to be able to make the jump back and forth. It would be worth your while to try, however. Barclay has a keen grasp of the life in the subdivisions, as is demonstrated by the cast of characters he has created and presented in BAD MOVE. Barclay also very neatly saves a plot twist for the near end of the book; I never saw it coming and was delighted when it did. Barclay additionally does a fine job of laying on the irony, making for a most satisfactory novel.
While BAD MOVE may be Barclay's first foray into fiction, it hopefully will not be his last. Barclay demonstrates a fine and steady hand, as well as keen insight into and a canny knowledge of his subject matter, combining those elements with an extremely readable writing style and a highly imaginative yet credible plot. You can't ask for any more than that.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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