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    Intruders
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    Intruders
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    Intruders
    Ebook466 pages8 hours

    Intruders

    By Michael Marshall Smith

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Now a BBC America original television show by the writer and executive producer of The X-Files!

    For ex-cop Jack Whalen, it all begins with a visit from a childhood friend, a lawyer who needs Jack's help. The family of a noted scientist has been senselessly, brutally murdered, and the scientist is nowhere to be found.

    But Jack has more pressing concerns. The past that drove him from the L.A.P.D. continues to haunt him. And his wife has disappeared during a routine business trip to Seattle. She never checked into her hotel. She isn't answering her cell phone. She is gone.

    A third missing person, a little girl from Oregon, is found miles away. But it soon becomes obvious that she is not an innocent victim … and far from defenseless.

    Something very strange is happening—a perplexing series of troubling events that's leading Jack Whalen into the shadows. And the secrets buried there are unlike anything he, or anyone, could possibly have imagined.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateSep 9, 2014
    ISBN9780062390844
    Unavailable
    Intruders
    Author

    Michael Marshall Smith

    Michael Marshall Smith lives in north London with his wife Paula, and is currently working on screenplays and his next book, while providing two cats with somewhere warm and comfortable to sit.

    Read more from Michael Marshall Smith

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    Reviews for Intruders

    3.5/5

    136 ratings9 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This was a genuinely creepy book. It was written in the same style as Koontz and King. You will never, for sure figure out just who "the Intruders" are. It was the kind of story that you had to go back to be sure of what was what. That being said, it was a very entertaining read.
    • 2/5
      A well-written story with a bizarre premise that went on far too long. I gave up about 3/4 of the way through and jumped to the end.
    • 2/5
      Really wanted to like this book. It started out well but I just couldn't get into it.
    • 4/5
      So this book is a slow read but it's intriguing. I usually give up one after a couple chapters of I'm not hooked but something kept me going. Well written maybe? It's a good story, Bottom line if you can get through to the end you won't regret it. "Thank you" to the author.
    • 2/5
      Sorry this book wasn't for me starts off well, I thought I was going to enjoy it. To be fair super natural stories aren't my thing. It took me about 300 pages to realize this wasn't my cup of tea but I wanted to finish it. Potentially a really good idea if you are into these types of stories. But not for me.
    • 3/5
      Everything Marshall writes is a pleasure to read, and this thriller doesn't disappoint. As usual his writing moves at a pace, with short chapters dense with fascinating characters and vivid locations which jump out of the page. As is his tendency, what seems simple at first develops into a backdrop of conspiracy with a tinge of fantasy/sci-fi underpinning it all.Highly recommended, I just wish he'd go back and apply his talent to some more pure sci-fi as Michael Marshall Smith.
    • 3/5
      I'm really not all that into his thriller/airport fiction stuff, but I'll keep reading it in case it shows any of the aceness of his quirky scifi books from the 90s.I've started reading this one, it's better than The Straw Man books.
    • 2/5
      Very good book, makes me happy to see Marshall back to form.Be advised, this book contains supernatural elements, if that sort of thing bothers you.
    • 4/5
      The Intruders is about people not acting as they usually would. About the actions we cannot explain, decisions we've made that we can't come to terms with - it's just not something we normally do.It's apt then, that Michael Marshall is really masquerading as somebody else. He used to be Michael Marshall Smith, began writing out-there sci-fi action, then decided to go the Iain Banks route, and write under two identities. Michael Marshall Smith would write the futuristic sci-fi; Michael Marshall would write the "real-world" thrillers.Except "The Intruders", Marshall's latest novel, isn't really a "real-world" thriller. It's pretending to be, but it's actually something else. The Smith part of Marshall's writing personality begins to creep in around the edges. And it's that, if anything, that saves the book.The story begins slowly - Jack Whalen is an ex-police detective, living with his marketing-executive wife in a little town in Oregon. Nowadays, he's a struggling writer, unsure of how to follow up the reasonable hit that was his first book. His writer's block finds an easy way to distract him from work, when a childhood friend shows up on his doorstep with a mystery for him to solve. It has a personal stake; the friend hints that Jack's wife, Amy, is somehow involved. Jack, irked and with growing frustration that he is not being told all the facts, begins to realise that his wife has been very distant of late. She's started smoking again, now wears bright-pink nail polish, and exhibits a number of other new habits, all of which are beginning to tell Jack that Amy is not the woman she once was.How right he is.Feeling guilty for doing so, Jack begins to investigate what Amy may or may not be telling him about her work, and a whole other life that she seems to be living in secret. Gradually, the job his childhood friend has for him and the mystery of his wife begin to merge into one confusing jumble of illicit photos, enigmatic text messages, a man on the run and others out for blood. And we find that Amy isn't the only one hiding secrets under the surface...Alternating chapters tell the tale of a confused young girl on the run, as well as the people she runs into along the way, and the disturbing impressions they get of her. The contents of these chapters are confusing. That, of course, is part of the mystery, and you do get the impression that all will be explained later on. Indeed it is, but being confused every other chapter begins to grate after awhile.Something makes me think that reading this book in one long session, possibly over a few nights, would work really well. When reading it over the course of a month, however, you begin to forget about things you have already been told. When names are brought up again later in the book, instead of thinking "Aha! I remember who that is!", you think "Who?", and find yourself flipping back to earlier in the book to work out just who that person is.Despite these downsides, from around halfway through the book, the strands of story begin to join together, and the central mystery begins to reveal more of itself, becoming vastly more intriguing as a result. The overall concept itself is fantastic - when it is eventually revealed, it makes perfect sense as a great idea, and you wonder why you hadn't considered it before. Marshall Smith's greatest asset in his science fiction has always been the overall concepts behind each book - each time, something banal and utterly ordinary is given a bizarre twist. He deals in mysteries that typically only children would wonder about, adults having come to accept as a rite of adulthood that some things defy explanation, and that we will never truly know how the world works."The Intruders", then, begins as a by-the-numbers thriller with a number of twists and turns, and is reasonably enthralling as the story unravels itself. Once you reach the halfway point, however, the story really picks up, takes a turn into the unexplained and the supernatural, and the reader will find themselves engrossed until the very end of the book. Whether one enjoys the story or not depends on whether they like their thrillers with straight-up "realism" or whether they are open to more fantastical story-elements. I, for one, am in the latter category.