No Time for Goodbye: A Thriller by Linwood Barclay

Delivers what it promises - tension, thrills and escapism

Published 2007 by Bantam

Linwood Barclay has quickly become one of my favorite authors. His books feature a happy family in which some event intrudes into their lives and turns everything upside down, very much like the classic black and white noire movies where the regular guy gets pulled into a seedy underworld that he had no idea even existed.  Note, these books are not deep, they are not fine literature in any sense. But, they drag you in and make you read right through to the end and the story is well worth the price of the book.

Linwood Barclay

No Time for Goodbye is no different. The story is about Cynthia and Terry Archer. They have one daughter. He's a high school teacher. She works in a women's clothing store. They are a happy couple except for one dark moment twenty-five years before when Cynthia was 14 years old. One day she woke up and her entire family was gone - her mom, her dad and her brother. No note. No luggage gone. No one packed anything. They were just gone.

So, on the 25th anniversary of their disappearance, Cynthia decides to work with a reality television show and have them tell her story in the hope that someone will remember something and give her a clue as to what happened.

Soon enough, things start to happen, but not what they had hoped for. Someone breaks into their house. A strange car starts to follow Cynthia and then things really start to spin out of control.

Great thriller. I rate this book 5 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: No Time for Goodbye.

Reviewed on December 5, 2011.