If you’re familiar with Linwood Barclay’s work, you’ll recognize the milieu of his 2018 psychological thriller, A Noise Downstairs. Like many of his books, it’s set in suburbia, in this case some small towns on the outskirts of New Haven, Connecticut. It’s a landscape he knows well, full of unfulfilled spouses and angst-ridden conflicts over child custody and related intrigue.
A Noise Downstairs gets right down to business. Paul Davis, a middle-aged college professor, notices an old friend and colleague, Kenneth, driving erratically at night. Thinking his friend is in trouble, he follows Kenneth and watches, confused, as the man appears to be disposing of some large object in a dumpster. When Kenneth later pulls off the road, Paul stops right behind him—and sees that his friend is hauling two dead bodies in the back of his car. Before Paul can even ask his friend what is going on, Kenneth hits him in the head with a shovel. Everything goes black.
Eight months later, Kenneth is serving life in prison and Paul is a wreck. Half recovered from major brain trauma, he’s finding himself in and out of a state of high agitation. He can’t remember things. He can’t concentrate. Paul is on leave from his job, but he wants to return to work. He wants his old life back.
Paul’s wife, Charlotte, also wants her old Paul back. It’s been a hard eight months for her, what with a husband who can’t remember when she tells him to take in the dry cleaning and a million other little things that are not right. She comes up with an idea, which is that Paul dig deeply into what went wrong with his old friend, Kenneth. The murders made no sense. The man didn’t seem to have it in him to do something so terrible, but he did, for some reason. If Paul can unearth that reason, maybe he can get his life back.
To help Paul in his quest for the truth, Charlotte buys Paul an old typewriter. Backstory: Kenneth’s murders involved the typing of mysterious notes by the victims. The typewriter was never found, but Paul thinks it was the large thing that Kennth threw into the dumpster. With a similar typewriter, maybe Paul can be even further inspired to get to the bottom of the whole bewildering situation.
That’s when the trouble really starts. Paul wakes up in the middle of the night to the sound of someone downstairs typing on the old Underwood. Scared and confused, he races downstairs to see if there’s an intruder in the house. No one is there… Charlotte wonders if he’s dreaming, or losing his mind even worse than he already has.
Things go from bad to worse, and then to even worser, if there were such a word. Paul keeps hearing the typing sounds late at night, but the house is empty. Then, he starts finding typewritten notes, that seem to have been written by the murder victims. Is Paul seeing a ghost? He starts to doubt his sanity.
Paul unburdens himself to his therapist, Anna, who also wonders if Paul’s brain damage is more serious than anyone thought. Anna tries to help him unravel the mystery, doing things that, in all honesty, I’m not sure a real therapist would do. But, this is fiction, so we go with it.
Barclay is a very skilled writer of psychological thrillers. He keeps up the drama and suspense. You really wonder what the heck is going on with Paul. I started to form a suspicion about what was actually happening, and I turned out to be right, but that’s part of the fun with a book like this. There are certainly many wildly unexpected turns in the plot. It’s a good read. I definitely recommend.