Book Excerpt

I just finished reading Too Close To Home by Linwood Barclay, the cover shouted at me in the used bookstore, “IF YOU LIKE HARLAN COBEN (I do,) YOU’LL LOVE LINWOOD BARCLAY.” So I picked it up. In the beginning it had that HC feeling, the plot was almost worthy of the statement, but in the end Linwood Barclay is no Harlan Coben. Not that I won’t read any more of his books, it was a mostly entertaining ride that is probably worth repeating.

As I went to color in the zero on page 101 (my way of ensuring I don’t pick up the same book more than once at our favorite used bookstore) I noticed that there was a page corner turned down. Ah, that’s right, I loved a little passage on page 182 that I wanted to share. Here you go.

In the years since she’d moved here from Hollywood, Ileana had gotten the small town college president’s-wife thing down pretty well. Expensive, but tasteful clothes, heels that were high but not towering and no longer made of clear plastic, a blouse unbuttoned far enough to draw your eye in, but not enough to give any real kind of show. But under all that upstate New York respectability there was still something of the tart about her. Like she was chewing invisible gum, making high-frequency snapping noises detectable only by the true hound dogs of my gender.