Barclay, Linwood: Too Close to Home

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TWEETABLE REVIEW: 4* A neighboring family's murder lays bare the secrets of a suburban family. Riveting read with unrealistic profanity. https://www.book-blog.com/2012/06/barclay-linwood-too-close-to-home.html

Jim Cutter is an artist/lawn maintenance guy and one-time chauffeur who lives in Promise Falls, New York, with his wife and teenaged son. Ellen Cutter works at the local college, whose president, Ellen's boss, is a blowhard literary phenom with one bestseller under his belt and another one allegedly on the way. The murder of a family just down the street from the Cutters throws their lives into chaos, not all of it directly connected to the crime: all of them have secrets, it turns out, some of them long buried, which the dramatic events of the book lay bare. Too Close to Home is a quick, riveting read. I have only two complaints about it. The first is extremely minor, Derek's likening himself to Leave it to Beaver's Eddie Haskell in the book's first chapter. Few kids Derek's age would know who that is, however, and you can almost hear the author saying as much to himself when he adds a clause describing the character, "in that show his parents watched when they were kids." My second complaint is more important: there is a lot of profanity in the book. I don't care about profanity per se, but much of what we read here just doesn't seem natural. For example, I don't think I have ever heard a suburban mother lightly use a certain feline term to refer to the pudendum mulieris. It just doesn't happen. The problem, of course, is that the profanity and the reference to Eddie Haskell are a bit jarring and take you out of the fictional world briefly. Other than that, though, this is a great read, which is no surprise: I've read a number of Barclay's books in the past and have always enjoyed them.