Fear the Worst is Barclay’s third novel, and I hope not the last. It’s a not a great thriller, but certainly — until the end — a compelling one.

Tim Blake is an ordinary guy caught up in a web of deceit that’s almost Hitchcockian. He’s a car salesperson struggling to deal with his failed marriage (his ex-wife is now living with a used car dealer he despises), his daughter’s near-adulthood, and the financial pressures from having gone bankrupt as a car dealer.

Yet he’s an overwhelmingly decent guy. You like him. He makes a lot of mistakes, just as any of us would, but he does his best, and it turns out to be almost enough. He’s pushed hard, and learns to push back.

What’s unusual is that for a crime thriller, this is such a novel of character — at least until the plot requirements take over the ending.

We see him with his daughter, with his ex-wife and her boyfriend, the paranoid woman he’s been dating, with co-workers, his boss, his daughter’s friends… we learn about him and them through dialog that’s revealing and funny.

After his daughter disappears, we feel his real anguish as he worries about her.

And his journey to find his daughter takes him deep into the inner lives of people than he’s ever had to go before. There’s a lot of information revealed about how people live and society that would be boring “social commentary” if not portrayed in entertaining fiction.

Of course, this is often an aspect of good thrillers, to take the reader into areas of poverty, criminality and social deterioration than they want to go in person. Barclay manages to pull it off with wit and good-heartedness.

This also has good elements as a thriller. Things happen which you don’t realize until later are “clues.” He plants obvious foreshadowings that pay off (the iPod), and others that are straw men (Milt the reindeer).

Unfortunately, towards the end I stopped believing. I know that human trafficking is a “hot” subject. I just don’t believe that such gangs as depicted here exist in the United States. Sorry. Yes, there are restaurants and such places that are willing to hire illegal immigrants for cash. But I don’t believe they’d go for the army of zombies described here.

Nor did I quite believe the “other” villain of the book. To name this person would give away the ending too much. However, I wasn’t just wasn’t convinced, and their death was just too easy and convenient, though I suppose morally necessary to balance the evil they did.

However, the scene in the car dealership show room is excellent. It’d make a terrific movie — which the author maybe hoped for!

So this book is well worth reading. I’m looking forward to reading more novels by Linwood Barclay.