"Fear the Worst" Be Brave and try this page turner

I was hooked on this novel from page 1.

Tim Blake is a used car salesman in Milford, CT. His 17 year old daughter, Sydney (Syd) is staying with him for the summer and working at a local hotel. One day she doesn't return home. When Tim goes to her hotel he is informed that Syd never worked there and they don't know her.

What should he do?

He tries to maintain his life and barely keeps some normalcy until police tell him that they've found Syd's car in a WalMart parking lot and that they found blood in it. He continues looking and gets a tip that Syd was seen in Seattle but it turns into a hoax. Someone wanted him out of the way, why? When he returns home, his house has been trashed and when the police arrive and search his home, something is found that puts Tim in a bad light, but he doesn't give up.

Tim may be a car salesman but he becomes "Everyman" in this story. Nothing stops him from his pursuit of his daughter. He may not be a Special Forces employee but he is just as heroic and this is much the theme of this work.

The suspense mounts and when we see Tim looking for his lost child, there seems an influence on Harlan Coban's writing. The setting is in the Milford, Stratford area of Connecticut. When I asked the author, who lives in Toronto, how he could so perfectly describe the setting, he mentioned that he was born in New Haven and lived in Darien early on. Then would visit relatives from his home in Canada. He remembered it well. Reading the scenes was like opening the "New Haven Register" and finding about this lost teenager.

Barclay is a symphonic master in this novel. The story starts slowly, like Ravel's "Bolero" but then the action mounts and it becomes John Philip Sousa and "The Stars and Stripes Forever."

Highly recommended!