Charles Maclean runs a farm and an inn in his native Scotland, and once every few years he writes a terrific thriller like this one. It's about a woman whose seemingly perfect life of luxury is really a ruin of deception and abuse. An attempt to escape with her son--traumatized into total silence--leads her into more trouble than she could have ever imagined. Hitchcock would have loved it.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the goodreads data base.
Charles Maclean is the author of crime thrillers, and has also written about the Scottish countryside and other non-fiction.
He is the son of Sir Fitzroy Maclean – an Etonian, brilliant linguist, near-legendary adventurer, war hero, diplomat and author of Eastern Approaches. Charles Maclean is something of an adventurer himself, and certainly in his own literary journey. His first job was helping set up the Ecologist magazine; he also worked on a ranch, and as a merchant seaman. His 1972 book, St Kilda: Island on the Edge of the World, is an evocative study of the island that has never been out of print. Other successes as a non-fiction writer included 1977's The Wolf Children, examining the cases of two girls in India, claimed as feral children raised in the wild.
This was a pretty fast book that kept me eager to read more. Threw me off at one point thinking it was going to go one way but went another and absolutely loved the ending
A pleasantly twisty & pulpy noir, The Silence is a quick read and mildly entertaining. It doesn't grab you the way Maclean's The Watcher does, but the characters are reasonably well fleshed out, and, appealingly, none are particularly likeable. Reading along as the double and triple crosses unfold is good fun but be advised that no new ground is covered here.