Tuesday 29 October 2019

REVIEW: Elevator Pitch by Linwood Barclay





Genre: Thriller, Mystery

Publisher: DoubleDay Canada

ISBN: 0385687206

Format: Hardback, Paperback, E-Book, Audio Book

Release Date: 17th September 2019

Links: Goodreads, Amazon.com, Indigo,
B&N, Book Depository


Synopsis:

It all begins on a Monday, when four people board an elevator in a Manhattan office tower. Each presses a button for their floor, but the elevator proceeds, nonstop, to the top. Once there it pauses for a few seconds, but the doors don't open. Instead, the elevator begins to descend floor-by-floor. Then it plummets.

Right to the bottom of the shaft.

It appears to be a random accident. . . . But on Tuesday, it happens again, in a different Manhattan skyscraper. And then Wednesday brings yet another tragic high-rise catastrophe. In only three days, one of the most vertical cities in the world--and the nation's capital of media, finance and entertainment--is plunged into chaos.

Clearly, this is anything but random. This is a cold, calculated bid to terrorize the city. And it's succeeding. Fearing for their lives, thousands of men and women working in offices across the city refuse to leave their homes. Commerce has slowed to a trickle. Emergency calls to the top floors of apartment towers go unanswered.

Who is behind this? Why are they doing it? Are these deadly acts of sabotage somehow connected to a fingerless body found on the High Line? Two seasoned New York detectives and a straight-shooting journalist race against time to uncover the truth before the city's newest, and tallest, residential tower has its ribbon-cutting on Friday night.







Review:


**Thanks to Penguin Random House Canada
for sending me a copy in return for my honest review**



I fell in love with Linwood Barclay's work after reading his book, A Noise Downstairs (review can be found here!), so I was beyond excited to pick up his next book.

Elevator Pitch starts with a man who is desperate for his script to be picked up, he follows the women who could hold the key to his dreams into the elevator where she works but something goes very wrong. The elevator begins to climb until it reaches the top floor before it suddenly drops, dropping until it hits the very bottom and killing/severely injuring everyone inside. Throughout the book the characters try their best to figure out the truth about the terrible deaths that are terrorising the city.

The start of the book had me completely hooked. Starting with such a horrific death really had me on the edge of my seat and I couldn't put the book down. I was desperate to figure out the mystery behind the deaths.

There were a range of different characters in the book. The two major characters are Barbara and Bourque. I really enjoyed both of these characters in particular.

Barbara was a teenage mother and doesn't often see her daughter. She regrets letting her parents bring up her daughter and wishes that she had had the courage to bring up her daughter the way she should have. Bourque is a detective who believes he has asthma. In reality, he doesn't truly have it, and his breathlessness is instead caused by a traumatic experience, but he believes that the inhalers are helping.

Both of these characters were really interesting. I really loved how the both had somewhat troubling pasts, Barbara with her child pregnancy and raising a child without a dad and Bourque with his breathlessness. The characters past and lives were brilliantly written and I really felt a connection to each of them.

The fear of stepping into an elevator was pushed to a new level in this book. Each chapter with the elevator plummeting to the bottom of the building had me on the edge of my seat. Linwood Barclay is a fantastic writer and this is the second book of his that I have fallen in love with. I highly recommend this book and I definitely want to pick up more of his other books.





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