First published 2012
Glen Garber is a Connecticut contractor riding out the housing crisis, holding things together while his wife Sheila takes night classes to find better work. Their eight-year-old daughter is asleep when Glen gets the news: Sheila and two other people are dead, killed in a car accident. The police say she caused it. Glen knows that is wrong. He knew Sheila. She would not have driven that way. So he starts asking questions. What he finds underneath the quiet streets of his suburb is not reassuring. There are layers of criminal activity behind the ordinary facades, neighbors who are not who they seemed, and people willing to use violence to keep their secrets buried. Glen is not a detective. He is a father and a widower who keeps pulling on a thread and cannot stop. The further he goes, the more dangerous his position becomes, and the more he realizes that protecting his daughter may require him to do things he never imagined possible. The Accident is a tight, fast thriller from Linwood Barclay about how quickly ordinary life can turn lethal.
Genres: suspense, mystery, crime, adult-fiction, thriller
Vibes: dark, fast-paced, gritty, suspenseful, tense
Tropes: ordinary-person-in-extraordinary-circumstances, protective-parent, pulling-the-thread
Setting: Connecticut
472 pages · Paperback · Orion
Content warnings: death, murder, violence