It's happened again. Story started out all right, some interesting stuff. But, at somewhere around the halfway point, I just didn't care.

When a story becomes a chore to experience, it ain't worth carrying on.

It should have been the greatest day of David's life. A trip to New York, wife by his side, to visit his new publisher. Finally, after years of lonely struggle it looks as though the gods of fate are on his side. But on the way back to Penn station, a chance encounter changes all of that. David bumps into a man who covertly follows him and, just before he boards the train, passes by him close enough to whisper: 'Remember me.'

When the stranger turns up in his home town, David begins to understand that this man wants something from him...something very personal that he may have no choice but to surrender.

Meanwhile, back in New York, ex-lawyer John Henderson does his girlfriend Kristina a favour and agrees to talk to Catherine Warren, an acquaintance of hers who believes she's being stalked by an ex-lover. But soon John realises that Catherine's problem is far more complex and terrifying than he could ever have imagined...

There are people out there in the shadows, watching, waiting. They are the forgotten. And they're about to turn.

Interesting novel with a very clever scenario at its heart, however I found it hard to engage with. ( )

A strange tribe of people who live unseen on the margins of the world, haunted by their weird and tragic relationship with particular people in the world but cut adrift and mostly insubstantial. A writer who just caught a big break. A couple working in a bar/restaurant. A wealthy super-mom. These people and more are caught up in this strange underworld they can't even begin to understand. Everything gets spooky and strange and scary and dangerous. And because I've been out in the sun all day (the sun! The sun!) that's all I have to say about that. The core idea pushes it a bit, maybe more suited to a YA book than an adult thriller, but it's the usual good read you get from Marshall (Smith.) ( )

Michael Marshall the thriller writer is less to my taste than Michael Marshall Smith the spec-fic writer, but I keep buying because he is in general such a good writer, full of little cutting gems. This book, though it had the general technical quality I expect, is the first one I’m not keeping. One of the protagonists of an earlier book, still pretty shell-shocked from those events, is now in NYC, eking out an existence with a serious girlfriend and a dead-end job. When his girlfriend asks him to investigate whether a member of her book club is being stalked, he’s drawn into an extremely dangerous confrontation with people who walk through the city almost unseen. Rationally, I know that it’s okay for characters not to be genre savvy, but this guy already survived a previous Marshall book! He knows that there are creepy conspiracies from beyond the bounds of conventional science that occasionally kill people! So I wanted him to twig to the situation (the people in this underworld are not what they seem) earlier than he did. On the other hand, I liked that we heard several competing explanations of what these people were, each of which made sense from the perspective of the person offering the explanation. But that delay in figuring things out, combined with the fact that all the characters were almost relentlessly petty—capable of doing good things for other people in extreme moments, but otherwise absorbed in their own lives and pains, too much like me—makes this a book that does not represent what I think of as Marshall’s best. ( )

This is set 6 months after Bad Things, which left no lasting impression on me. We Are Here will leave a little more (including an irrational guilt for forgetting my own childhood invisible friend - thanks MMS), but was ultimately unsatisfying with a rushed climax that lacked resolution.

This will bear a reread (probably together with Bad Things), if only for the intriguing world of the invisible friends. ( )