Far From True

I read a Linwood Barclay 2007 novel a year ago, No Time for Goodbye, and he’s a prolific author. When given the chance to review this new 2016 book by NetGallery, I went for it. This is Barclay’s 25^th novel and the second in a trilogy about the town of Promise Falls. Perhaps I should have started with the first one, Broken Promise, but, oh well. There are lots of characters and multiple story lines, not all of which get resolved by the end of this book, hence, the trilogy.

The drive-in theater was closing down and many of the town’s people wanted to catch its last show. But in the midst of the movie, in a terrorist-like act, the huge screen was blow up, and it came crashing down on the cars. The cars nearest the screen suffered the worst damage, and the old Jag owned by Adam Chalmers was totally crushed, the bodies of both people inside being destroyed beyond recognition. But, was that Adam’s wife, Miriam in the car? Or was it another woman? And what of the private and secret sex room in Chalmers’ house, and what happened to the missing DVDs of the orgies they had been having there? What about the other people who were tied to those partner-swapping parties, who could not be identified without the missing discs?

Adam had a very shady past from which he seemed to have escaped with an inordinate amount of money. He loved his only daughter, Lucy Brighton and Lucy’s emotionally-challenged daughter, 11-year-old Crystal. Adam had promised to provide for them if something ever happened to him, but what happened to the letter that he had hidden for Lucy to find in just such a situation?

There’s a local college, Thackeray, which was a source of some young and well-drugged women for the sex parties. A professor and his wife, Peter and Georgina Blackmore, as well as the head of campus security, Clive Duncomb, were somehow tied into these events. Duncomb was a former Boston cop who had just shot and killed a student at Thackeray who was suspected of being a serial rapist. Duncomb liked to run his own show and was not cooperating with the local and dysfunctional detective squad. As Chief Detective Duckworth tried to solve a couple old murders and work on the new crimes, he was not getting any assistance from Duncomb.

And what of Cal Weaver, a good guy and former Promise Falls policeman, who had become a private investigator? He had already suffered the great losses of his wife and son, and was trying to get his act together. And then there’s his love interest Samantha Worthington whose ex was in prison and whose former in-laws were trying to kidnap her son. Another key story line is about David Harwood who had lost his job as a reporter when the local paper closed down, and desperate for some income, accepted a job as the campaign manager for the slimiest of politicians, Randall Finley who was trying to regain his job as the mayor, a title he lost when he was previously caught with underage hookers. And then there’s the mystery of the #23, the number on the hoodie of the boy who was killed by Duncomb, the time of the night when the movie screen blew up (23 hours, 23 minutes), the number of dead squirrels that had been hung up, and the number of the bus that was set on fire.

So, there are lots of intertwined story lines, some of which are solved in the course of this novel, but we are left with a cliffhanger when another murder takes place of one of the young women who had been drugged up for one of the sex parties.

This was fast paced, a couple good guys to like and some definite villains to hate. The Amazon rating for this book was 3.5/5.0, and I think that’s about right. At some point, I assume I’ll pick up the third book in the series.

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.