Now that it’s a new year, I am trying to make a concerted effort to read the books that are in my possession. That is the case for this bargain bin purchase I made sometime in the last few years. A Noise Downstairs by Linwood Barclay certainly redeemed itself in the last fifty pages or so, but the journey there was a bit of a drag.
I will say that the story does open really interestingly, too! Paul is driving when he notices one of his colleagues from the college he teaches at driving a bit erratically. He decides to follow him in case he gets into trouble, but what he encounters instead is horrific. Kenneth Hoffman has two dead bodies in the trunk of his car and upon finding them, Paul is about to be the next one. It sure seems like that was the outcome, but instead we meet Paul eight months later recovering from a severe head injury instead. Hoffman’s in prison, but that doesn’t help Paul sleep better at night. The head injury also isn’t helpful, as he still has trouble with his short term memories at times. His therapist, Anna White, helps as best she can, but Paul is trying his best.
He thinks he needs to write about his experience to purge himself of the incident, and when his wife Charlotte brings him home an old typewriter, he thinks he’s on the right path. That is, until he starts hearing it in the middle of the night. He works through all of the logical reasons and then settles on being reached out to by the two women Hoffman killed. No one else in Paul’s life are on board with this theory, and he’s eventually led to believe that maybe he’s been more mentally damaged by the event than he’s been thinking he has all this time. Anna has her own doubts, but she’s got another sociopathic patient that isn’t helping matters. She certainly breaks a multitude of HIPPA laws, but we won’t get into that. She’s concerned about juggling her patients and her dementia-suffering father.
Like any good novel, there are plenty of red herrings, though they were a bit more obvious to me this time around. What I will say though, is that by the time you’ve got between fifty and seventy pages remaining, the story takes a sharp left turn and some juicy details get out. There are a number of “surprise,” though one I was fully expecting. But the other – whew! To get there though, we work through a lot of the same old, same old. About halfway through, I’d decided to finish because I had gotten that far, but I was not excited to keep reading. Even though the events at the end were exciting, it wasn’t enough for me to love this book. Read it or don’t, there’s plenty of other great suspense novels out there.