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NO TIME FOR GOODBYE
by Linwood Barclay
Bantam, August 2008
480 pages
$9.99 CAD
ISBN: 0553590421


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

The sudden and absolute disappearance of a child is a parent‛s worst nightmare, and one that does not, unfortunately, reside always in the land of night terrors. In this novel, which has proved extremely popular on both sides of the Atlantic, Linwood Barclay imagines the total reverse - the child is left, the family gone.

Cynthia Bigge is your typical teenager suffering from adolescent rage. Rebelling, as one does, against apparently quite nice parents, she goes out on the town, drinks too much, and is caught by her furious father, who grapples her out of her boyfriend‛s car and back to the safety of her bed. When she wakes the next morning, suffering from a terrible hangover, she discovers her family, father, mother, and brother Todd, is gone.

With the self-centeredness typical of most fourteen-year-olds, Cynthia immediately concludes that they are punishing her for her waywardness. But they never return, and even after twenty-five years, where we pick up the story, there is still a nagging doubt in Cynthia‛s mind that she may have been abandoned as unworthy.

After appearing on a crime re-enactment TV show in the hopes of finding some clue to the disappearance, Cynthia begins to receive hints that the Bigge family still exists somewhere. Now married and herself the mother of a little girl, she insists on following up what leads she has. Her husband, Terry Archer, would prefer to let sleeping dogs lie (and in hindsight, he might have been right), but, faced with his wife‛s anger and disappointment at his perceived lack of support, he does what he can to help.

The story is told from his point of view thereafter, one that becomes a high-tension thriller in which a pleasant and agreeable schoolteacher from suburban Connecticut is forced to confront some extremely nasty people and discover resources within himself that he never knew he had.

The novel that forces a confrontation between conventional suburbanite and existential evil is always an attractive fictional prospect. This one is unusual in that the suburbanite in question, Terry Archer, does not become a fury-driven superhero, capable of acts of violence usually confined to the kind of movie he wouldn‛t dream of attending in his normal life. Terry simply does the best he can. Perhaps this relatively restrained take is a function of the nationality of its author. Linwood Barclay is Canadian, a resident of Toronto, though he does a thoroughly plausible Connecticut/upstate New York scene. Whereas American novels of this type tend toward the apocalyptic, Canadian versions of the theme often find less extreme resolutions. I am looking forward to his next standalone, which is forthcoming shortly.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, August 2008

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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