Just What Kind of Fake Psychic Are You?

Ah, Linwood Barclay. As I have documented on previous reviews, I loved him, then I nearly broke up with him, and then with Trust Your Eyes, he won my heart all over again. This short sharp little story first appeared as a novella titled Clouded Vision, which was published for the Quick Reads initiative. Barclay has expanded the original novella into a fully fledged novel (though still short, at just 270 pages), though as I haven’t read the original, I can’t do a compare and contrast.

Barclay brings back some characters from his breakthrough novel, No Time For Goodbye, here. Front and centre is fake psychic Keisha Ceylon, who specialises in finding missing people through her “visions”, for a fee of course. She “helped” the Archer family at the centre of that earlier novel, and Terry pops up for a cameo here too. She spies Wendell Garfield and his pregnant daughter on the news, appealing for the safe return of his wife Ellie and thinks “jackpot”. But then Keisha’s educated guesses are a little too close to the bone and she finds herself up to her neck in a possibly fatal situation.

There’s some other plot strands swirling around the main one there, and Barclay never lets his foot off the gas on any of them for barely a minute. To tie up all the loose ends does take some awfully huge leaps of faith, but then there aren’t that many pages to do it in, so you have to either go with it, or bow out after the first chapter. I went with it and while this is very much Barclay in a minor key, it’s still a better book than The Accident, and nowhere near bad enough to make me consider breaking up with him. Bring on A Tap On The Window.