Linwood Barclay

“A Tap on the Window”

It's been two months since private investigator Cal Weaver's teenage son, Scott, died in a tragic drug-related accident. Ever since, he and his wife have drifted apart, fracturing a once-normal life. 

Cal is mired in grief he can't move past. And maybe that has clouded his judgment. Because he made a grave mistake driving home on a very rainy night. A drenched young girl tapped on his window as he sat at a stoplight and asked for a ride. 

And even though he knew a 40-something man picking up a teenage hitchhiker is a fool, he let her in the car--she was the same age as Scott and maybe she could help him find the dealer who sold his son the drugs that killed him. 

However, after a brief stop at a roadside diner, Cal senses that something's not right with the girl or the situation. But it's too late. He's already involved. 

Soon Cal finds himself mired in a nightmare of pain and suspicion. Something is horribly wrong in the small town of Griffon in Upstate New York. There are too many secrets, too many lies. And Cal decides to expose those secrets one by one.

 "The Accident"

Glen Garber, a contractor, has seen his business shaken by the housing crisis, and now his wife, Sheila, is taking a business course at night to increase her chances of landing a good-paying job. 

But she should have been home by now. With their eight-year-old daughter sleeping soundly, Glen soon finds his worst fears confirmed: Sheila and two others have been killed in a car accident. 

Grieving and in denial, Glen resolves to investigate the accident himself—and begins to uncover layers of lawlessness beneath the placid surface of their Connecticut suburb, secret after dangerous secret behind the closed doors. 

Propelled into a vortex of corruption and illegal activity, pursued by mysterious killers, and confronted by threats from neighbors he thought he knew, 

Glen must take his own desperate measures and go to terrifying new places in himself to avenge his wife and protect his child.

http://www.amazon.com/A-Tap-Window-Linwood-Barclay-ebook/dp/B00AMOOHVM
Over the years, several of Linwood Barclay's novels have been optioned for film and television. Most recently, No Time for Goodbye has been optioned for television in France, and in 2012, Trust Your Eyes was the object of a film rights bidding war between Universal and Warner Bros.
After spending his formative years helping run a cottage resort and trailer park after his father died when he was 16, Barclay got his first newspaper job at the Peterborough Examiner, a small Ontario daily. In 1981, he joined the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest circulation newspaper.
He held such positions as assistant city editor, chief copy editor, news editor, and Life section editor, before becoming the paper’s humour columnist in 1993. He was one of the paper’s most popular columnists before retiring from the position in 2008 to work exclusively on books.
In 2004, he launched his mystery series about an anxiety-ridden, know-it-all, pain-in-the-butt father by the name of Zack Walker. Bad Move, the first book, was followed by three more Zack Walker thrillers: Bad Guys, Lone Wolf, and Stone Rain.

His first standalone thriller, No Time for Goodbye, was published in 2007 to critical acclaim and great international success. The following year, it was a Richard and Judy Summer Read selection in the UK, and did seven straight weeks at #1 on the UK bestseller list.
Barclay, who graduated with an English literature degree from Trent University, in Peterborough, Ontario, was fortunate to have some very fine mentors; in particular, the celebrated Canadian author Margaret Laurence, whom Linwood first met when she served as writer-in-residence at Trent, and Kenneth Millar, who, under the name Ross Macdonald, wrote the acclaimed series of mystery novels featuring detective Lew Archer. I