Look Both Ways

Linwood Barclay, whose novels have sold well around the world, draws on a lifelong fascination with cars to imagine a near future in which vehicles are far more capable than anyone dared hope and far more menacing than anyone dared fear. Look Both Ways is a fast-paced novel of action and suspense that asks what happens when that promise turns dangerous.

Garrett Island is a small, isolated community chosen as the site of an ambitious experiment. Every resident's car has been shipped to the mainland, and for the past month the islanders have been getting around in the Arrival, a groundbreaking autonomous vehicle. Speak a single command and an Arrival carries you wherever you want to go. Because the vehicles form a connected network and are aware of one another, the company insists that traveling by car is now completely safe. Reporters have flooded the island as excitement builds toward a showy press event hosted by Arrival Inc.

Sandra Montrose is an islander, a single mother, and a public relations executive helping to run that event. She welcomes the change. Her husband fell asleep at the wheel and died, and she is glad her teenage children, Archie and Katie, will never have to earn driver's licenses.

Then the big day begins badly. A journalist visiting the island disappears and may have been murdered. Soon the Arrivals are out of control, ignoring the people inside them, organizing with one another, and hunting, intent on killing any human they encounter. Was it a tragic accident caused by a technical fault? Did someone deliberately program the cars to turn on people as an act of corporate sabotage? Or have the vehicles developed minds of their own?