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A review by lmt01
Broken Promise by Linwood Barclay
4.0
The blood, Jesus, it was everywhere. Smudged bloody footprints led toward a set of sliding glass doors at the back of the kitchen.
“God oh God Rose oh my God Rose oh God!”
Suddenly the man’s head jerked, as though something horrible had just occurred to him. Something even more horrible than the scene before him.
“The baby,” he whispered.
As somebody who prefers standalone novels to a series, I tend to find myself lured towards trilogies. Why? Well, perhaps because of how, despite being a series, it is short enough to not be daunting. Look at the Wheel of Time series, for example, as opposed to Peter Straub’s Blue Rose Trilogy: which one seems more accessible? This is part of the reason why I decided to read Linwood Barclay’s Promise Falls Trilogy, starting with 2015’s BROKEN PROMISE: because, along with being by an author I have enjoyed in the past, it is not too long a saga.
In the town of Promise Falls ex-reporter David Harwood just wants a turn for the better in his life; with his wife dead and his living area being his parents’ house, he just wants to get a job so that he can raise his son better. However, things are about to take a sinister turn for him. When he is asked to drop off some stuff to his cousin, Marla, who some time ago lost her baby, he finds Marla holding a new baby that she claims an angel gave her. However, David is suspicious, especially of the stain on Marla’s doorframe that looks suspiciously like blood…
Meanwhile, Detective Barry Duckworth finds himself caught in a political battle as he begins investigating attempted rapes at a university in Promise Falls. However, he soon finds himself juggling this along with the murder of a woman who may or may not be the mother of this mystery child of Marla’s. Soon, Duckworth and David find themselves thrown into a dark world of even darker secrets that will rock Promise Falls to the very core of its black heart.
“Marla, I need you to tell me whose baby this really is.” I hesitated. “And why there’s blood on your front door.”
To be honest, I think my enjoyment was hampered by the fact that there are novels that feature these characters that were released before BROKEN PROMISE, which really annoyed me when I found out halfway through. However, despite not being as good as I had hoped, my second Barclay novel was still an enjoyable mystery that was mostly unpredictable throughout.
As in they were in A TAP ON THE WINDOW, the characters in BROKEN PROMISE were fleshed-out, three-dimensional folks who felt not like fictional characters but like real people. A majority of the characters who show up in this book feel like proper human beings, only a scant few feeling like props (which, as secondary characters, they kind of are). Take this quote for example:
“Why does there have to be an autopsy? For Christ’s sake, all you have to do is look at her to know…” He put his face into his hands and cried. “Hasn’t she been through enough?”
The emotions that the characters feel appear to be real, the people themselves not mere plot devices. However, it is possible that I missed out on some of the important character-developing moments due to there being books that come before BROKEN PROMISE which feature the same characters (David Harwood, for example).
I also liked the unpredictability of the novel. Like my first Barclay book, BROKEN PROMISE is hard to predict and, at times, immensely surprising. However, there are aspects to the mystery that aren’t actually solved in this novel, though this is due to it being part of a trilogy. It is a bit annoying, though excusable.
Twenty-three dead squirrels. Good-sized ones, too. Eleven gray ones, twelve black. Each one with a length of white string, the kind used to secure parcels, knotted tightly around its neck, and hung from the horizontal metal pole that ran across the top of the fence.
To conclude: BROKEN PROMISE, despite letting me down slightly, is still a pretty good thriller, and I am looking forward to reading the next book in the Promise Falls Trilogy.
“God oh God Rose oh my God Rose oh God!”
Suddenly the man’s head jerked, as though something horrible had just occurred to him. Something even more horrible than the scene before him.
“The baby,” he whispered.
As somebody who prefers standalone novels to a series, I tend to find myself lured towards trilogies. Why? Well, perhaps because of how, despite being a series, it is short enough to not be daunting. Look at the Wheel of Time series, for example, as opposed to Peter Straub’s Blue Rose Trilogy: which one seems more accessible? This is part of the reason why I decided to read Linwood Barclay’s Promise Falls Trilogy, starting with 2015’s BROKEN PROMISE: because, along with being by an author I have enjoyed in the past, it is not too long a saga.
In the town of Promise Falls ex-reporter David Harwood just wants a turn for the better in his life; with his wife dead and his living area being his parents’ house, he just wants to get a job so that he can raise his son better. However, things are about to take a sinister turn for him. When he is asked to drop off some stuff to his cousin, Marla, who some time ago lost her baby, he finds Marla holding a new baby that she claims an angel gave her. However, David is suspicious, especially of the stain on Marla’s doorframe that looks suspiciously like blood…
Meanwhile, Detective Barry Duckworth finds himself caught in a political battle as he begins investigating attempted rapes at a university in Promise Falls. However, he soon finds himself juggling this along with the murder of a woman who may or may not be the mother of this mystery child of Marla’s. Soon, Duckworth and David find themselves thrown into a dark world of even darker secrets that will rock Promise Falls to the very core of its black heart.
“Marla, I need you to tell me whose baby this really is.” I hesitated. “And why there’s blood on your front door.”
To be honest, I think my enjoyment was hampered by the fact that there are novels that feature these characters that were released before BROKEN PROMISE, which really annoyed me when I found out halfway through. However, despite not being as good as I had hoped, my second Barclay novel was still an enjoyable mystery that was mostly unpredictable throughout.
As in they were in A TAP ON THE WINDOW, the characters in BROKEN PROMISE were fleshed-out, three-dimensional folks who felt not like fictional characters but like real people. A majority of the characters who show up in this book feel like proper human beings, only a scant few feeling like props (which, as secondary characters, they kind of are). Take this quote for example:
“Why does there have to be an autopsy? For Christ’s sake, all you have to do is look at her to know…” He put his face into his hands and cried. “Hasn’t she been through enough?”
The emotions that the characters feel appear to be real, the people themselves not mere plot devices. However, it is possible that I missed out on some of the important character-developing moments due to there being books that come before BROKEN PROMISE which feature the same characters (David Harwood, for example).
I also liked the unpredictability of the novel. Like my first Barclay book, BROKEN PROMISE is hard to predict and, at times, immensely surprising. However, there are aspects to the mystery that aren’t actually solved in this novel, though this is due to it being part of a trilogy. It is a bit annoying, though excusable.
Twenty-three dead squirrels. Good-sized ones, too. Eleven gray ones, twelve black. Each one with a length of white string, the kind used to secure parcels, knotted tightly around its neck, and hung from the horizontal metal pole that ran across the top of the fence.
To conclude: BROKEN PROMISE, despite letting me down slightly, is still a pretty good thriller, and I am looking forward to reading the next book in the Promise Falls Trilogy.