Trailer Park Tuesday: Trust Your Eyes by Linwood Barclay

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies. Unless their last name is Grisham or King, authors will probably never see their trailers on the big screen at the local cineplex. And that's a shame because a lot of hard work goes into producing these short marriages between book and video. So, if you like what you see, please spread the word and help these videos go viral.

Swift, suspenseful, and jolting, the trailer for Linwood Barclay's new novel, Trust Your Eyes, comes at us like a relentless neon sign blinking "Watch Me.  Buy Me.  Read Me."  Even before I knew what the book was about, I was thinking to myself, Hot damn, I really gotta check this one out.  In fact, the trailer is so good, I all but overlooked the endorsement from Stephen King ("Barclay vaults to the top of the suspense pantheon").  Trust Your Eyes appears to be something like an updated version of Rear Window for the modern wired world.  Here's the plot summary from the publisher:

Thomas Kilbride is a map-obsessed schizophrenic so affected that he rarely leaves the self-imposed bastion of his bedroom. But with a computer program called Whirl360.com, he travels the world while never so much as stepping out the door. He pores over and memorizes the streets of the world. He examines every address, as well as the people who are frozen in time on his computer screen. Then he sees something that anyone else might have stumbled upon—but has not—in a street view of downtown New York City: an image in a window. An image that looks like a woman being murdered. Thomas’s brother, Ray, takes care of him, cooking for him, dealing with the outside world on his behalf, and listening to his intricate and increasingly paranoid theories. When Thomas tells Ray what he has seen, Ray humors him with a half-hearted investigation. But Ray soon realizes he and his brother have stumbled onto a deadly conspiracy.

For a trailer that's only 84 seconds long, Trust Your Eyes ratchets up the tension quickly and slickly.  I can only hope the book does the same.