I thoroughly enjoyed Linwood Barclay's Fear The Worst.  It's hard to imagine the pure terror that a parent will go through, when their child vanishes.  Barclay managed to bring this fear home, in this captivating story.

Tim Blake is an average guy.  Divorced, hard-working, and trying to relate to his seventeen-year-old daughter, Syd.  But when Syd goes missing, Tim sets out on a one-man mission to find her.  Especially since the police are not too helpful, first deciding she's a simple runaway, and then deciding she's a victim of foul play, and Tim, himself, is their number 1 suspect.  Worst of all, when Tim goes to Syd's job, to see if she's shown up there, no one there has ever heard of her.  If Syd's been lying about where she works, what else might she have been lying about?  As Tim digs further into her disappearance, he uncovers far more than he ever expected.  And as bodies start falling around him, he knows that if Syd is out there, somewhere, then he's her last possible chance to stay safe.

The story moves extremely quickly, as clues to Syd's whereabouts come in rapid succession.  Of course there are plenty of red herrings along the way, times where you think the story's going one direction, but then it changes yet again.  One thing this story does not suffer is predictability. There was never a time when I was certain I knew what was going to happen next.

Tim is extremely likeable, and I couldn't help but feel his fear and pain, worrying about his daughter. But the other characters that are introduced aren't nearly so likeable, and most are basically one-dimensional. Especially all of the teenagers that Tim talks to - Syd's friends and ex-boyfriends.  Each is written with one purpose in mind, to provide exactly one clue to Syd's whereabouts.  We never get to know a single one of them, except to learn that their generation is in real trouble, if these kids are representative of real kids these days.  Each of them is a complete and total mess, not a shred of goodness in any of them.   

Other characters are written to be purely bad as well, not just the teenagers.  There's Tim's ex-wife, who for most of the book doesn't do a darned thing to help find her daughter.  There's her current boyfriend Bob, who doesn't seem particularly concerned about Syd.  And there's Syd's friend's mother, a hopeless drunk who doesn't seem to care at all that a young girl is missing.  And there's Tim's boss - a woman who cares far more about her bottom line than her employee's troubles.  These distasteful characters really drag the book down.  But they make us feel even sorrier for Tim - who's really on his own in the investigation.

Other than the ridiculous array of unlikable characters, the only other complaint I have with this book involves some of Tim's decisions.  Especially towards the end, he makes some decisions that I never would have made.  There was one time in particular where Tim's decision not to contact the police made no sense to me.  He really set himself up for a whole lot of trouble down the line in that case.  Another time he learns that someone he thought he could trust has been lying to him the entire time. And yet, the next time this person tells him something, he believes it.  And of course there are huge consequences.  How could he have believed anything that person said after finding out about all the previous lies?

Still, those are fairly minor complaints.  Because the bottom line is that I was completely engaged in the story, and definitely wanted to find out what happened to Syd.  I would recommend this book.

  

Recommended: Yes