Review of No Time for Goodbye by Linwood Barclay

“On the morning she will never forget, suburban teenager Cynthia Archer awakes with a nasty hangover and a feeling she is going to have an even nastier confrontation with her mom and dad. But when she leaves her bedroom, she discovers the house is empty, with no sign of her parents or younger brother Todd. In the blink of an eye, without any explanation, her family has simply disappeared. Twenty-five years later Cynthia is still haunted by unanswered questions. Were her family murdered? If so, why was she spared? And if they're alive, why did they abandon her in such a cruel way? Now married with a daughter of her own, Cynthia fears that her new family will be taken from her just as her first one was. And so she agrees to take part in a TV documentary revisiting the case, in the hope that somebody somewhere will remember something - or even that her father, mother or brother might finally reach out to her...Then a letter arrives which makes no sense and yet chills Cynthia to the core. And soon she begins to realise that stirring up the past could be the worst mistake she has ever made...”

I have loved everything I have read by Linwood Barclay so far. This book got me hooked right from the start. I loved the way the book started in 1983 and then went into the present. This gave us the back story from Cynthia’s point of view about what happened that night.  

No time for goodbye is written from Cynthia’s husband’s perspective. At times this can be annoying as I Cynthia comes across as the main character as it is her family that disappeared. However reading the story from her husband’s point of view we get to see in depth the problems he encounters and we go along on his journey as he works out what happened 25 years ago.

Throughout this book though there seemed to be a few thriller novel clichés and I was able to work out what had happened pretty quickly. With this authors books he tends to have lots of twists and turns throughout the novel however I felt that the ending fell a bit flat, it didn’t really add much to the overall story. There is a second novel coming out based on these characters so I hope that maybe the story follows on.  

4/5 stars