No Time for Goodbye

The story starts in May 1983 when Cynthia Bigge was 14 years old. She was having some big disputes with her parents, and then she made it worse one night by lying about where she was going and who she was going to be with. When she missed her curfew, her mother quickly discovered that her alibi of being with her best friend was untrue. Cynthia arrived home totally drunk, and then she passed out. She woke up late for school, with a bad hangover, and then rushed out of the house, only being surprised that the house was so quiet. Uncharacteristically, her parents and her older brother weren’t there. During the day, when she learned her brother hadn’t come to school at all, she ran home to discover no one was there – and in fact, her family had disappeared, and no clues were found about their disappearance for the next 25 years. Cynthia then grew up with an aunt, and there was always a cloud over her that either she had something to do with her family’s disappearance, or that she had been such a bad character that they simply chose to abandon her.

Fast-forward 25 years. Cynthia is now 39 years old and married to Terry Archer, a high school English teacher. They have an 8-year-old daughter, Grace. Cynthia’s psyche has been permanently marked by her early family tragedy, and she’s terribly afraid that something will happen to Grace. Cyn can’t let Grace out of her sight, and the precocious child is feeling smothered by her. Terry steps in as much as he can, but Cyn is a pretty fragile woman, so Terry keeps his interventions on the soft side. At times Cyn thinks she hears the voices of her missing family, and at times, she is sure she is being followed and watched. In this case, she is not just being paranoid.

First, her beloved aunt Tess, the woman who had stepped in as a surrogate mother, was murdered. Then, the detective she had hired to find information about her missing family was also killed. Next, she ran into a man who she thought looked exactly what her brother would have looked like so many years later. The stress was tearing at the fabric of her relationship with Terry, and Cyn’s anxiety was obviously rubbing off on Grace.

The author’s resolution of the mysteries and crimes was quite clever. This was more of a plot-driven story than one of character development. No Time for Goodbye is the first novel by Linwood Barclay, who was born in the U.S., but is now known as a Canadian author. This novel was published in 2007, and I would rate it in my category of airplane books. I read it on a two-legged flight from Chicago to Montreal, with a short layover in Minneapolis. It entertained me for the few hours that the trip took and finished during the approach to Montreal. After taking a look at some more Canadian authors, I’ll probably find my way back to one of Barclay’s later works. Thanks for the recommendation from Guy Dubois of The House of Crime and Mystery and A Crime Festival in Quebec City.