Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Annie Blunt is a successful author of children’s books, but now her life is in tatters.  Her husband John was killed in a hit-and-run accident and her famous cartoon character, Pierce the Penguin, inadvertently led to the death of a young boy who was trying to replicate the penguin’s flight by taping cardboard wings to his arms and leaping to his death from an apartment balcony.

She is so distressed that she tells her editor that she must get away from New York City with her young son Charlie.  He says he’ll find a place for her and he does, a house in the small town of Lucknow in upstate New York.  When she and Charlie see it, it’s love at first sight.  Annie hopes that this summer home, even if temporary, will help her son deal with the death of his father and control the episodes of sleepwalking that started after John’s death.

Right from the beginning of their stay, however, there are some strange happenings.  When Annie sees an elderly woman on a front porch across the road, she starts to walk over to introduce herself.  But the woman gets out of her chair, turns her back on Annie, and goes into her own house and slams the door.

The woman’s husband Daniel comes over to Annie to explain his wife’s behavior.  He tells her that one day, more than twenty years earlier, his wife had entered the house Annie is renting and began screaming and couldn’t or wouldn’t stop.  The doctors told her husband she had a psychotic break, and although medication is controlling her symptoms, she has never been the same since.

Trying to turn the conversation to a more pleasant topic, Annie tells Daniel that she misses the New York City noises but loved hearing the train whistle in the middle of the previous night.  Daniel tells her there hasn’t been a train going through the town for several years, that she must have heard something else.  Not wanting to get confrontational with her neighbor, she says “maybe so,” because she doesn’t think it’s worth an argument.  But Annie knows what she heard.

Then there’s the mysterious shed in the backyard.  Its door is sealed with a padlock, but by climbing on top of a pile of wood Charlie can see inside.  There are boxes inside that he would like to investigate, but first he has to find a way inside.  Then he has a dream in which his father tells him to look inside a basement drawer for the key to the shed.  When he wakes up he goes down to the basement and finds the key exactly where it was in his dream.  He goes outside, puts the key in the padlock, and the door opens.

Whistle is told in two voices–Annie’s and Harry Cook’s, the police chief of Lucknow.  Although Harry has lived his entire life in the town, things are happening now that he can’t explain.  First two men in the town go missing, and one is found dead with all the bones in his body gone.  Then the town vagrant disappears, leaving no trace.  And why does a backyard barbecue explode, leaving traces of the man at the grill strewn across his lawn?

Linwood Barclay, a master of suspense, has written another outstanding thriller.  Although I’m generally not a fan of the supernatural, this novel is so realistic and the characters so well drawn that I read it believing every word!

You can read more about the author at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.

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