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Summary
Summary
Carla Roberts lives alone in the top of a highrise building, frightened by the sound of the lift stopping and opening on her floor, with nobody getting out. Days later, she's found brutally murdered. Meanwhile Samson Segal, an unemployed thirty-something, has taken to spying on his neighbors, particularly beautiful and successful Gillian Ward. When Gillian's daughter comes home to an empty, locked house, Samson takes her in but finds himself venting his anger in his diary when his good Samaritan actions go unappreciated, unaware that his suspicious sister-in-law cracked his password long ago. When Gillian's husband is then murdered in his own home, Samson comes under intense scrutiny but the only man making any progress on the case is the one who shouldn't be working on it. Yet he's the only one who believes Samson is innocent . . .
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Unemployed, socially awkward Samson Segal spends his days spying on neighbors, especially attractive Gillian Ward, in the upscale London suburb of Thorpe Bay. He's creepy but seemingly harmless-until murder enters the equation, in this tautly plotted psychological thriller, the second by the bestselling German novelist to appear in the U.S. (after 2012's The Other Child). Tied by forensic evidence to two other recent unsolved slayings, the case quickly becomes a top priority and Samson a prime suspect, once his sister-in-law shows police the voyeuristic diary she has discovered on his computer. But it's not that simple, thinks John Burton, the handsome former detective inspector, who just began a relationship with the married Gillian and, fearing for her safety, jump-starts his own investigation. As Burton, who is forced to leave Scotland Yard under a cloud, and his former colleagues race to uncover possible connections between the disparate victims that might enable them to catch the killer, Link masterfully builds both character and suspense to a shocking extended climax in a snowy forest. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Someone is watching Gillian Ward. Actually, several someones, each with a different agenda, some of them creepy, one of them lethal.As befits the object of so much scrutiny, Gillian emerges only gradually to a leading role. She's first glimpsed as the perfect wife and partner of London tax and business consultant Tom Ward and the mother whose 12-year-old daughter, Becky, is convinced she's horrible. By the time Gillian surrenders to the amatory overtures of John Burton, a disgraced former Scotland Yard detective who runs a private security firm and coaches Becky's tennis team, Hackney divorce Carla Roberts and retired Tunbridge Wells physician Anne Westley have already been killed in strikingly similar ways, bound with duct tape and smothered with towels shoved down their throats. As Burton's mortal enemy, DI Peter Fielder, and Fielder's lust object, DS Christy McMorrow of the Metropolitan Police, labor to unearth a connection between the two women, Link keeps cutting away to Samson Segal, a deliveryman forced by unemployment to share the home of his brother and sister-in-law. Samson's never had a date, and given the way he treats women, he never will. But he can't take his eyes off Gillian. He follows her around the neighborhood they share, dreaming of getting her to notice him. Soon after their one run-in turns out disastrously, Tom is shot dead by a gun linked to Anne Westley's murder. What else can go wrong for Gillian? Quite a bit, it turns out.Link (The Other Child, 2013) switches so deftly among her different characters' viewpoints that the web she weaves is tinged by an exceptionally powerful sense of miasmal paranoia. Only the hyperextended last act, plunging her damsel into a much more traditional kind of distress, is a letdown. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Who would want to kill Carla Roberts, a quiet, retired divorcee with few friends and presumably no enemies? And what could Carla possibly have in common with middle-aged wife and mother Gillian Ward? If there were a connection, surely Samson Segal would know about it. An unemployed 30-year-old living with his brother and sister-in-law, Samson is enamored of the Ward's close-knit family and spends a large part of his day watching Gillian. When Gillian's husband is murdered, Samson is a prime suspect. He's protected by an unlikely source Gillian's lover, who is her daughter's tennis coach and a former police officer dismissed for sexual misconduct. In Link's skilled hands, seemingly disparate story lines come together in a nail-biting climax. This is the second novel (following The Other Child, 2013) by a best-selling author in her native Germany to be released in the U.S. Fans of Tana French's twisty crime novels will devour this suspenseful read.--Keefe, Karen Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
MICHAEL KORYTA is a fearless stylist who has put his hand to ghost stories, historical novels, killer-thrillers, revenge tragedies, morality tales and detective stories. He's now swinging from the high wire with THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD (Little, Brown, $26), a heart-thumping backwoods adventure that sends two creatively sadistic killers into Montana's Beartooth Mountains, where they spark a monster forest fire to flush out the only witness to their crimes: Jace Wilson, a 14-year-old boy. Jace was just trying to escape his reputation as class coward when he dived into a quarry near his Indiana home. But when he swam into a dead man - and spotted the killers flinging a second victim into the water - Jace knew he was going to die. Reborn with a new name, he finds himself among the "bad kids" in a grueling wilderness survival course, parked there when his parents couldn't be persuaded to put him in a traditional witness protection program. Jace's hunters, the Blackwell brothers, are heartless sociopaths whose professional detachment is etched in their unnervingly precise grammar and careful diction. ("The way they say things. Like they're alone in the world. Like it was built for the two of them and they're lords over it.") There will be no mercy from that quarter. Koryta rigs his tripwire plot with all sorts of unpredictable characters and unforeseen events, including a "flint-and-steel" electrical storm that will make your hair stand on end. There are any number of hunting parties combing the burning woods for Jace, from the Black-well brothers to two determined women riding an injured horse. But sitting here, heart in mouth, it sure looks as if that raging forest fire will outrun them all. IS THERE ANYTHING more unnerving than the realization that you can't trust your own mother? Maybe the realization that you can't trust your father either. That's the killer premise Of THE FARM (Grand Central, $26), a psychological thriller by Tom Rob Smith that draws on the universal fear of losing a parent. The narrator of this split-focus story is a young man named Daniel who lives in London and hasn't been in close touch with his parents since they retired to a farm in rural Sweden. Then one day he gets a frantic phone call from his father, who tells him that his mother has had a psychotic break and is in an asylum. But before Daniel can head for Sweden, his mother arrives with a wild tale of being terrorized by his father and the rich owner of a neighboring farm. Smith's atmospheric narrative draws on fearsome local legends about trolls with "shrapnel teeth" and "bellies like boulders," but as Daniel discovers, the "iron nights" of winter in rural Sweden can drive a stranger a little crazy. IN SUSPENSE FICTION, walking into danger is usually women's work. Joseph Finder flips that convention in SUSPICION (Dutton, $27.95) when a writer named Danny Goodman, a widower who's going nowhere on a biography of Jay Gould, gets into hot water by accepting a $50,000 loan to keep his daughter, Abby, in her pricey private school. The loan comes from Tom Galvin, the indecently rich father of Abby's best friend, and soon after the check clears, two D.E.A. agents strong-arm Danny into spying on Galvin, who's reputedly acting as a financier for a Mexican drug cartel. Finder sets a stiff pace for the escalating crises that keep Danny both in thrall to his handlers and in a state of high anxiety. As he gets to know Galvin, and even considers him a friend, he finds himself wondering what, exactly, makes Galvin any different from a 19th-century robber baron like Jay Gould. SOME PEOPLE CAN'T get enough of Jack the Ripper, and for that clique there's Alex Grecian, who takes an obsessive interest in Saucy Jack in his historical potboilers. "He was deathless," we're told in THE DEVIL'S WORKSHOP (Putnam, $26.95), in which a freakish jail break allows the monster to escape from his cell at Bridewell Prison and embark on another murderous rampage. Detective Inspector Walter Day and other members of Scotland Yard's elite Murder Squad are on hand for the blood bath, as is Dr. Bernard Kingsley, whose work in the new field of forensic science lent historical authenticity to the series's previous novels. Unfortunately, scientific investigation doesn't figure much in this narrative, which is firmly fixated on the savagery of Jack's deeds. SOMEONE IS WATCHING you, but no one is there. Charlotte Link plays on that primal fear in her psychological suspense story, THE WATCHER (Pegasus Crime, $25.95), when an attentive killer goes to work on single women so socially alienated that their bodies can lie undiscovered for days. "What they have in common is their loneliness," one of the Scotland Yard detectives remarks. More mystifying is what the victims have in common with Gillian Ward, who lives with a husband, a 12-year-old daughter and a black cat named Chuck. Unless it happens to be Samson Segal, the neighbor who's stalking the family because they reside in "the world he had always dreamed of." The cool precision of Link's narrative voice (translated from German by Stefan Tobler) makes it clear why this kind of adulation is so chilling.