Most books have a beginning, a middle and an end. The high point of this best-selling novel turned out to be the beginning, which of course expanded on the intriguing premise of the story: a teenage girl wakes up to find her parents and brother missing, and like most readers (I assume) I wondered what on earth was going on. Then there was ‘the middle’, which in a nutshell was much too long because after perhaps 300 pages I was none the wiser as to the reasons behind the family’s disappearance and apart from the mildly mysterious goings-on the only real point of interest remained the basic plot. Then there was ‘the end’, which I won’t describe here but I will vent my opinion that it was pretty awfully written and in dire need of professional editing.

This story depends very heavily on the answer to the big question raised on the back cover - why did fourteen-year-old Cynthia Bigge’s family disappear in 1983 without a trace? There’s no doubt that it was a fascinating concept, a reversal of the traditional child-gone-missing premise. Eventually all would be revealed but it would have to be pretty special in order to satisfy the high expectation build-up. Things are not right from an early stage however, because as soon as we move twenty-five years on from the vanishing, the story-telling changes to first-person but not from Cynthia’s point of view. Instead her husband Terry is the narrator, which detaches the reader slightly from an emotional perspective, as it wasn’t his parents or brother that disappeared. Once accustomed to that, there are hundreds of pages that should give us an opportunity to really get into the mind and under the skin of the woman at the centre of all this: Cynthia Bigge, now in her late thirties. But it never really happens. Yes, she frequently states the obvious about how she would love to know what happened all those years ago, but curiously, and despite the reader wanting to care for her and for the emotional torture she must have endured down the years, this particular reader - me - never really cared as much as I felt I should. This is a critical element to the tale, because if feelings are light about the central character then our reactions to the revelations at the end are bound to be diluted. This is undermined even further by experiencing the outcome from Terry’s point of view while the person who really matters - his wife Cynthia - has disappeared from the narrative, and since it is HER reaction to the truth that matters most, this is a major mistake on the author’s part.

I agree with others who have accused the writing style of being plain-vanilla, one-dimensional, devoid of imagery and often immature in prose and structure. Most characters are shallow and colourless, the few that stand out are just stereotypes. The story is mediocre at the beginning, slowly deteriorates throughout the seemingly eternal ‘middle’ and really collapses in a mess at the conclusion. It feels as if the final few chapters were written almost as quickly as I was reading them, with apparently no editing or re-writing at all. My impression of the story took a dive at the end and I felt comprehensively let-down and unsatisfied, a big disappointment given the unusual synopsis. In fact with the benefit of hindsight I almost wish I could have stopped reading after 100 pages and left it at that; the mystery of what happened might have haunted me for years, but instead, having completed the novel, I find it compares poorly with similar stories in the mystery thriller genre.

The real culprit for this novel’s failure is the writing itself. I can’t help but feel that if a proven thriller writer had been given the same premise, even if he or she had been told to duplicate the entire story and its conclusion, then the finished product could have been immeasurably better. My own rather cynical view is that the high sales of this book have been the result of a TV promotion (notably the Richard & Judy Show), without which it would never have been noticed at all and would have disappeared into obscurity. It really isn’t very good at all, and yet again it demonstrates that a top-selling novel is not necessarily a good one.

See the CTF book recommendations thread.

Tags: Linwood Barclay, No Time for Goodbye, review

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