The Intruders

At our August meeting, Peggy gave me a copy of Michael Marshall's new book, The Intruders. Years ago,as Michael Marshall Smith, he wrote Spares, a tight little sf novel I liked a lot about people being bred for their organs. More recently, he dropped the Smith from his name and began writing thrillers (The Straw Men, Blood of Angels) that tend to feature sf or horror elements.

The Intruders is a decent little bus ride book. I won't claim any more for it than that. Jack Whalen is an ex-cop who became a writer almost by accident. He's lucked into a nice life in the Pacific Northwest until one day, a cab driver calls him on his wife's cell phone. Fearing trouble, he heads to Seattle and it looks as though she's dropped off the face of the earth--her office is unaware of the meeting she said she was going to be attending and she never checked into the hotel she said she'd be in. Then Jack's wife appears back home acting like nothing has happened. Only she's changed in subtle ways that only her longtime husband would notice. At the same time, a little girl walks off the beach away from her mother, being led forward like a puppet on a string as she inexorably makes her way towards Seattle. And Jack is contacted by a man he hasn't seen since high school who wants his expertise to investigate a recent double murder.
In classic thriller style, Smith accelerates the plot with short chapters and by bouncing back and forth between Jack's first person perspective and third person of a few of the other characters as he slowly pulls the threads together for the climax.

As I said, Marshall has tended to use sf and horror tropes to liven up his thrillers. In this case, the concept that people are living their rational lives while all around them the shadowy "real" world is just out of focus, which is a classic horror idea, and the secret ruthless organization that knows what is really going on and that should be avoided at all costs, which has roots in both horror and sf. Marshall is a very good writer and he is able to load all of this up with a nice sense of dread for Whalen and the other characters in the novels. But as I was reading, I did feel as though I'd read a lot of books just like this. And very recently. For example, Bryan Smith's Deathbringer a recent release from Leisure Horror (Oh, shut up) had a similar idea at its core. There's probably nothing in The Intruders anyone in our group would find all that new, either. So I can't recommend grabbing The Intruders in hardback, but if someone is nice enough to offer you a free copy, well then you should certainly take it.