Linwood Barclay is a Canadian humourist , author and former columnist .

Linwood Barclay is a Canadian humourist, author and former columnist.

Linwood 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

Life section editor

Between 1996 and 2000 be published four non-fiction books, including a memoir about growing up in cottage country, Last Resort, which was shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humor.

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

Stone Rain

His first standalone thriller,No Time For

Goodbye, was published in 2007 to critical

acclaim and great international success.

It was the single best selling novel in the UK in

2008, selling more than 600,000 copies.

It was at Trent that he met the woman who would become his wife.

He and Neetha, who teaches kindergarten, have been married for more than 30 years.

They have two children, Spencer and Paige.

Linwood is putting the finishing touches to Only Death is Real, the novel that will come out in 2011.

Never Look Away

A warm summer Saturday. An amusement park. David Harwood is glad to be spending some quality time with his wife, Jan, and their four-year-old son..

But what begins as a pleasant family outing turns into a nightmare after an inexplicable disappearance.

As David struggles to restore his family, he discovers that the people we’re most close to are the ones with the biggest secrets

No Time FOR Goodbye

No Time for Goodbye has been sold around the world and is being translated into nearly three dozen languages.

One night, when Cynthia Archer was 14 years old, her family disappeared.

Now, 25 years later, she’s about to learn what happened to her mother, father brother, and she might be better off never finding out.

Fear THE Worst

Sydney Blake’s summer is shaping up to be typical for a teenager: she’s spending it with her father, and she has landed a part-time job at a local hotel.

One night, Syd fails to come home from her shift, and her father Tim begins to panic after he visits the hotel and the manager claims that Syd has never worked there.

As the list of unanswered questions grows, all Tim knows for certain is that he must continue searching for his daughter no matter how high the stakes become.

Stone Rain

Zack Walker gets drawn into the dangerous and violent past of his former neighbor, dominatrix Trixie Snelling.

Bad Guys

Zack Walker has joined the staff of a city newspaper and his feature on the life of a private detective has dragged him into the doings of a murderous gang of thieves.

The car he bought at a police auction contains a secret that could get him killed.

And it’s possible his daughter is being stalked by a dangerous would-be boyfriend

Bad Move

Bad Move introduces Linwood’s reluctant hero, Zack Walker, a science fiction writer and perpetually worried father who moves his family from the dangerous city.

The Walker family’s change of scene doesn’t bring about tranquility, but it does introduce them to political corruption, a marijuana-growing operation, the neighborhood dominatrix, and murder.

In this funny yet poignant memoir, which was shortlisted for one of Canada’s top literary prizes.

Last Resort

The Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, Linwood Barclay tells the story of his teenage years, when his parents left behind the suburbs of Toronto to run a cottage resort and trailer park in the Kawartha Lakes region of Ontario.

Zack has a run-in with some home-grown terrorist types while trying to help out his father.

Lone Wolf

Too Close To Home

Promise Falls isn’t the kind of community where a family is shot to death in their own home.

But that is exactly what happened to the Langleys one sweltering summer night, and no one in this small upstate New York town is more shocked than their next-door neighbors, Jim and Ellen Cutter.

Suddenly the Cutters must face the unthinkable: that a murderer isn’t just stalking too close to home but is inside it already.

For the Langleys weren’t the first to die and they won’t be the last.