Read the exclusive second chapter of The Lie Maker by Linwood BARCLAY
Read the first chapter of Sunday Times bestselling author, Linwood Barclay’s explosive new thriller The Lie Maker, out August 31st.
TWO
Jack I should have been more excited, first day at a new job. It wasn’t as if I didn’t care. I was glad to have found something. I told myself it was temporary. Didn’t mention that in the interview, of course. No prospective employer wants to think you’re viewing a position with them as a stopgap, although I think the guy who interviewed me, Terry, probably suspected it.
Like when he asked me, point-blank, “So, Mr. Givins, why on earth would you want to work for us?” It was a good question.
Terry Crawford was the managing editor for a stable of trade magazines: Contractor Life (aimed at the construction industry), RV Life (for recreational vehicle manufacturers and enthusiasts), Plumbing Life (no explanation necessary), and so on. When I had observed, in the interview, the recurring theme in his magazines’ titles, he had grinned and said, “We’re high on life here.”
He’d added, “Doesn’t strike me that this would be the kind of place where you’d want to put your skills to work. Not that you aren’t qualified. Getting two books written up in the New York Times? That’s pretty impressive.”
So he had done a bit of internet sleuthing. The books had been written under a pseudonym, but I’d been revealed as the author in one of those reviews. Someone at the publishing house must have leaked it at some point, although it created little buzz in the literary world. Good reviews in the Times had not led to a spot on the paper’s bestseller lists. My first book, Avoidably Inevitable, had sunk like a stone. My second, A Life Discontinued, also garnered some praise, but the sales were only marginally better than the first book. My third, Lost and Unfounded, had yet to find a home despite the efforts of my literary agent, Harry Breedlove. I’d told him just before I interviewed with Terry that if he couldn’t sell that book I was putting the full-time novelist thing aside indefinitely.
I could live with that if I had to. I’d only been out of the conventional workforce a couple of years. I’d spent a few at a mediumsized daily Massachusetts newspaper, writing as well as working on the desk, editing stories, writing headlines, assigning reporters. I liked that world, and was lucky to have worked in it, given that I had no journalistic background. I’d arrived at the right time, when the paper was short-staffed and the editor wasn’t fussy.
But the timing wasn’t entirely fortuitous. The industry, fighting a losing battle with the internet for readers and advertisers, was already in decline, and in the short time since I’d left, had contracted even further. Even before I left the Worcester Tribune, it had gone through two rounds of layoffs. The pandemic had made things even worse. Reporters had been working from home for so long, several papers dispensed with their newsrooms altogether and sold the buildings. The publishers were so encouraged by how much money that saved them that they started to look for more ways to make a profit, so they slashed their reporting staffs. It was like trying to save money at a restaurant by firing the cooks.
Anyway, getting a job at a paper again was out of the question, so here I was looking to work for a publisher of trade magazines. But I didn’t feel I could tell Terry he was my last hope, even if he was. I was running out of money.
“The books are kind of a side thing,” I said. “I’m looking for something steady.”
“Gotta keep the paycheck coming in, right?” Terry said. “Married? Got kids?”
“No,” I said after a second’s hesitation. “Not married. No kids.”
“You’d oversee production of five magazines,” he said. “Each comes out six times a year.”
“Sounds manageable,” I said. “I can turn things around in a hurry. I’m pretty meticulous about getting things right.”
Terry smiled. “Well, that’s great, although to be honest, it’s not that big a deal since I don’t even know how many of our subscribers read these things, unless it’s an actual story about them. The way we work it is, with a lot of our publications, we assign stories based on who buys ads.”
The dreaded “advertorial.” Content based on what someone was willing to pay. So much for objective journalism. I wasn’t going to let that worry me today.
Terry’s operation was based in Everett, one of Boston’s suburban so-called cities, just across the line from Charlestown. I already had an apartment there, so there wouldn’t be much of a commute. I’d moved closer to the city not long after I’d left the Worcester paper to have more of a cultural life—movies, theater, music—as well as to be nearer to Lana Wilshire.
Well, almost nearer. Lana was no suburban girl. She lived in the heart of the city, in a fancy condo that overlooked the harbor and, on the other side of the bay, Logan Airport. She was one of the Boston Star newspaper’s senior reporters, and we’d met a few years earlier when she was covering a winter plane crash near Rutland, northwest of Worcester. I was on that story, too, and while we were waiting for a press briefing I offered to share a warm car with her while her photographer was elsewhere with the vehicle they’d driven up in. An hour and a half later we had each other’s phone numbers and email addresses and had arranged to meet for dinner the next weekend in Boston.
We’d seen each other off and on for a few months. The relationship went quiet for a while, and then we picked things up again. Things had been semi-serious for the better part of a year. Neither of us had proposed any kind of major step, but it was in the back of my mind.
I’d just parked my car to go in for my first day on the new job when she sent me a text, which I only noticed when I took my phone out to check the time. I’d muted my phone the night before and forgotten to flip it back on that morning. I’d missed a call from the place I was about to walk into. Lana had texted: Got your Funk & Wagnalls?
An inside joke, referencing a long-extinct American dictionary and encyclopedia publisher. I grinned, and thought about composing some witty retort before I headed into the building, but settled on: Talk soon.
Once the phone was tucked into my pocket and before I went into the building, I did something I’d done out of habit for as long as I could remember. I did a visual sweep of my surroundings. Scanned the parking lot and the street in both directions. It was second nature to me, and I did it without really thinking about it.
I didn’t know where my office was supposed to be, so I went straight to Terry’s.
He was behind his desk when I rapped on the jamb of his open door. “Jack Givins, reporting for duty.
It was far from glamorous, his office. This wasn’t The New Yorker or Vanity Fair, although, for all I know, they’re a mess, too. His desk was littered with papers and folders, all crowded around a desktop and a laptop. Gray filing cabinets lined the walls, and half a dozen calendars from companies his magazines had done stories on decorated the walls, hanging from pushpins, not one of them turned to the right month. It was the kind of office that, forty years ago, someone would have plastered with centerfolds from Playboy, but even Contractor Life had moved on from those days.
Terry was a small guy, maybe five-four. Slight, with a receding hairline. His thick-rimmed glasses were his dominant facial feature.
“Oh, hey, Jack,” Terry said. “Tried to call you.” He didn’t look well. Like he’d had a bad chili dog the night before and it was just now catching up with him. “Have a seat.”
“Everything okay?” I asked. A nervous laugh. He glanced at his desktop monitor, then the laptop, not looking for anything in particular. Killing time. “The thing is, there have been some developments.” “Developments,” I said. “I’ve been thinking, and I don’t believe this is a good fit for you. I mean, it’s great for us, because you’ve got the skills, you know, but with your background, I think we’d be holding you back.”
“Shit, Terry, you firing me before I’ve even started?
He kept trying to avoid eye contact. “I mean, if you were to be honest with me, you’d only be taking this job until something better came along.”
“If I gave you that impression,” I said, “then I apologize. It was never my intention. The truth is, Terry, I need this job.”
His face went grim. “Then that makes this even harder. We were doing a review, and we’ve lost a lot of subscriptions postpandemic. That wouldn’t be so bad, but that corresponded with a significant drop in advertising. Everyone’s pulling back. Take Screener Life, for example. That one’s gone off a cliff.”
That was their magazine for projectionists and movie theater owners. It made sense that that one would take a hit, given that film lovers had been fearful, for a couple of years, of going to a movie and catching something from the somebody sitting next to them.
“Only one we got making any money is RV Life. During the pandemic, so many people were hesitant to fly or leave the country, they went out and bought Winnebagos. And with the way gas prices are, that one’s probably gonna be on life support soon. Anyway, what I’m getting around to saying is, I’ve got no money in the budget for your position anymore.”
I sat there, numb. Surprised, for sure, but also, at some level, relieved. I hadn’t been lying when I told him I needed this job. I had under five grand in my checking and savings. I wasn’t looking forward to writing and editing stories about drywall and advances in water-saving toilet technology and peel-and-stick tile, but life is full of compromises, of making decisions we don’t want to make. “Sorry,” he said.
I stood.
“Okay, then,” I said. I was holding a quick debate in my head about whether I wanted to make this difficult for him. “I’m not sure this is legal, Terry.”
“Yeah, well, I looked into that, Jack, and in this state, unless you’re fired because of your gender or race or a disability, or you’re pregnant, an employer can pretty much fire anyone for any reason and there’s nothing you can do about it, even on the first day.” He tried to lighten the mood in the room. “You’re not pregnant, are you?”
I headed for the door.
“Funny thing,” Terry said, and I stopped and slowly turned. “I guess you figured out I googled you, which is how I found out about those two books you wrote. And some stuff came up about when you worked at that paper up in Worcester. But there’s not much online from before that.”
“Is there a question?” I asked.
“Were you, like, living off the grid or something?”
“Maybe I was just minding my own business,” I said. “You might want to give it a try.”
I left. I was just getting into the car when I got another text from Lana:
Where should we go to celebrate tonight?
This extract is taken from The Lie Maker by Sunday Times bestselling author, Linwood Barclay.