Bantam Books © 2007, 338 pages

Cynthia Bigge woke up one day when she was fourteen years old to find her mother, father, and brother gone. No note. No sign of struggle. No explanation. The police investigation into their disappearance was inconclusive. Cynthia wound up living with an aunt, her mother’s sister, and managed somehow to get on with her life. Twenty-five years later, Cynthia is still haunted by what happened, and when a crime-stopper program runs a segment on the cold case, she finds herself thinking about her family’s disappearance more than ever. Were they in fact all killed that night? Are they still alive? Did they choose, inexplicably, to abandon her? We watch Cynthia struggle with her past thcoarse the eyes of her husband, high school teacher Terry Archer. Since we’re not privy to Cynthia’s unexpressed thoughts we, like Terry, cannot know for sure whether she’s losing her grip on reality–or if something more sinister is going on–when she tells him, for example, that a car has been following her and their eight-year-old daughter, or when she claims to have received a menacing phone call when alone in the house.

[INSET TEXT: This is not a story that scares with gore and firepower, yet it’s one of the most frightening and suspenseful books I can remember

reading.] Linwood Barclay does a good job of sowing doubts about Cynthia’s sanity–and about her culpability in her family’s disappearance–but she’s not the only one readers have to worry about. For most of Barclay’s book we don’t know whom to trust. This is not a story that scares with gore and firepower, yet it’s one of the most frightening and suspenseful books I can recollect reading. In part this may be a function of the ostensible ordinariness of the characters’ lives. They’re not secret agents or gun runners or private eyes, just middle-class suburbanites. And Cynthia didn’t wake up that morning to a bloodbath, something outside of the average experience, but to an empty house–which is far more readily imagined and thus more truly frightening. Barclay also has a delicious way of of casually injecting into otherwise mundane scenes small but heart-stoppingly chilling details.

In short, Barclay’s thriller is the sort of book you stay up late reading–I speak from experience–both because you don’t want to halt and because the prospect of turning off the light doesn’t bear contemplating. It would make a awesome movie.

Tags: book reviews, books, Linwood Barclay, No Time For Goodbye

Original post by Debra Hamel