No Safe House, by Linwood Barclay

ISBN: 9781409120353
Amazon ID: B00JV1W2FA

The second sentence has a mis-spelling of pyjamas. The author is Canadian, not American, so should be able to get this right.

The Prologue (correctly spelled) and the first four chapters are all a bit random and confusing, but given that this is a detective thriller, that's okay - it works for the genre. The next two chapters start to tighten things up, and we get into the story. This works well.

20% into the book, and it's turned into a good story. You keep wanting to find out "what next?"

The mother is a completely paranoid massive control freak, and the daughter is an idiot for getting involved in things that are so obviously a bad idea, and completely goes to pieces when she realises what a bad idea something was.

Ultimately, it's a good story, though; recommended.

I didn't know that "wellmanicured" could be one word, and without a hyphen. The same applies to "strawberryfilled". I also found "fivesix" to be an interesting number. One of the buildings is apparently a "twostory". Someone tries to make up for this later in the book by "whisper ing".

In Chapter Two we are introduced to a house which has been converted into four apartments, "two on the ground floor and two upstairs". The person who lives there mentions the person living across the hall ("Nathaniel") and then says that "on the first floor, there's Winnifred". Okay, it's a strange spelling of the name, but never mind that for now.

By Chapter Fifteen, it appears that Nathaniel is still "across the hall", but Winnifred is now downstairs.

So, we're told that the building has two apartments on the ground floor, and two upstairs. Winnifred initially lives on the first floor, then later she lives downstairs. There's no mention of her swapping apartments with Nathaniel, and besides, he's been "across the hall" from the central character all the time, so all four people in the house would have had to move apartments for this to make any sense. Film directors have "continuity people" to look after this sort of thing - maybe there's a need for authors to have them too (or this part of an editor's job?)

Intriguingly enough, two pages after we learn that Winnifred is now downstairs, her (elderly) opposite neighbour appears upstairs, trying to get into Nathaniel's apartment, claiming that it's his own. I think perhaps he remembers the house as it was before the author became confused.

Someone gets kidnapped. Immediately, a bag is put over her head. Later on, she reasons that maybe "being blindfolded was a blessing. If they were going to kill her, they wouldn't want her to see their faces."

Who cares what she sees if she's going to be dead?

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