What do readers think of Far From True by Linwood Barclay? Write your own review.

What a great book! This book had an abundance of characters, therefore a number of motives. If you love a mystery this is a book you want to read.

I am a Linwood Barclay fan and have read the first book in this trilogy.

Barclay is a very good suspense/thriller writer and the many plots and sub-plots were well done. The characters were well-drawn and stayed true throughout the story. There were plots left from the first novel and some new mysteries as well. I would recommend this book with one reservation: The first book tied up enough mystery to be satisfying as a stand-alone. This book resolved nothing and the end seemed unsatisfying, more like it was a chapter than a whole book. It's going to be hard to wait for book 3.

I've read many of Barclay's suspense/thrillers and was excited when I received this copy of the second book in his Promise Falls series. Luckily I had read the first book, Broken Promise so I was familiar with the main characters. Again the main detectives/investigators are prime to this story. Again the storyline itself is unique and makes for a great page-turning novel. However, I found the abundance of characters Barclay introduces kept me slightly confused. Maybe that's good though. I definitely had to be remain alert so as to guess the real culprits in the mystery. Because I had read the previous novel, I found the flashbacks used for the "catch-ups" a little distracting. I would have rather seen this book as a stand-alone novel. Forget the previous happenings in book one. But I still enjoyed Barclay's writing style and his creative story. I'm a little prejudiced when it comes to the mystery/thriller genre, however. I'd read them 24-hours a day if I could! Barclay always provides me with an entertaining few hours.

Far From True is the second in a continuing story about Promise Falls. On a clear and beautiful night a group of young guys try to sneak into the outdoor theater, which is scheduled for demolition the next week. Just as the group drive up there is a huge explosion which brings the movie screening crashing to the ground crushing several cars and their occupants. From there the story looks to identify the who and why of the explosion and who and why were those murdered in the explosion. Finding out exactly who turns into kind of a circus which is explained by the why of those murdered. But as in the previous book we have reached another cliff hanger.

If you like serials with characters killed off as new ones are added this serial of Promise Falls novels is well written and kept my interest even though I had not read the previous book. I prefer my mysteries to be nicely concluded with a satisfying resolution which is why it has a four star rating from me. I would like to know if the mayor is re-elected and what 23 means. Next book.

Far From True by Linwood Barclay is an enjoyable, eminently readable page turner that kept me interested. I like Barclay's writing style and the vignettes in the book are well-written and engrossing. There are some interesting characters and the criminal activity in the small town of Promise Falls is intriguing.

However, I really struggled with my rating. As much as I enjoyed the story, there are some factors that I found extremely frustrating.
1) this is the second book in a series about these characters from Promise Falls. I felt that Far From True does not work well as a stand alone book.
2) there were too many characters that appeared infrequently that caused me to keep flipping back and reviewing chapters I'd already read. This would not work well with an E-Reader.
3) nothing seemed to be resolved by the end of the book. It will be necessary to wait for the next installment and purchase the next book to have any sense of closure. I would rather pay more for a longer book and have some wrap up than be left hanging a la "who shot JR".
4) I really wanted to rate the book 3.5 - this was better than average but falls short of good because of the frustrating issues described above.

Best-seller Canadian crime-novelist ,Linwood Barclay, sets his stories in Promise Falls, a run-down town in northern NY state. Though the town's economy is depressed, its citizens are lively; there is enough murdering bad behavior and sexual derring-do to satisfy a hot Las Vegas suburb. Certainly enough to keep the reader engaged.

Barclay is a skilled writer, with a fine sense of plot. Unfortunately, he also has borrowed a tedious trait from Charles Dickens, and leaves major plot-lines unresolved, awaiting the next (as yet unpublished) novel. The loyal reader is left dangling - and irritated.

Far From True was even better, the plot tighten up and Barclay made better use of his characters in this book. The twists and turns were better. At the end of the book Barclay has done it again wrapped up some of the dangling story lines but one and that is hopefully what the last book, Twenty-Three will do when it is released November 1 of this year.

I am looking forward to it…

Having read several of Barclay's previous novels I was looking forward to settling into 'Far From True'. Unfortunately it was a disappointment from the start. It read like a book in the middle of a series - not so much because the reader was assumed to know anything but because Barclay inserted so many asides into the narrative seemingly in an attempt to provide background information. However none of these asides were relevant to this particular storyline so they felt unnecessary and awkward. The story itself had some interesting possibilities but I felt that it fell as flat as the characters. The characters were little more than their names.....no physical descriptions of what they looked like, no inner monologues to hint at what they were thinking, no personalities were provided for any of them - there was really no character development at all. Also distracting was that some of the characters had unnecessarily similar names which became a bit confusing because without a clue of what they looked like there wasn't much to help distinguish 'Duncomb' from 'Duckworth'. (And in that particular case one was a former-cop-now-a-security-guard and the other was a cop which added to the confusion). Even stranger and more disappointing was that there wasn't an ending to the book. As readers we have no idea 'who did it' because the book just ends without wrapping up any of the plot points or telling us who the killer was. After 447 pages there wasn't a reveal, no resolution, no conclusion at all. While I don't recommend this book I would refer anyone interested to start with Barclay's older novels as those were much more satisfying all-around.