Linwood Barclay - No Time For Goodbye

The house was deathly quiet. That was the first sign that something was terribly wrong. Fourteen-year-old Cynthia Bigge woke that morning to find herself alone. Her family - mother, father and brother - had vanished without a word, without a note, without a trace. Twenty five years later, Cynthia is still looking for answers. Now she is about to learn the devastating truth.

Cynthia and Terry Archer still live in Milford, Connecticut, not far from the old Bigge house on Hickory Street. With a solid marriage and a young daughter, the Archers seem on track for a successful future. But the questions raised by Cynthia's past still haunt her, and her obsession to find the answers threatens to destroy everything they've worked for. For Cynthia, there can be no closure until she finds out why her family disappeared - and how they could have left her behind.

Terry thinks the segment on the popular TV crime-stopper Deadline is a mistake. But his wife hopes that someone watching will have a lead to her missing family. Sure enough, it's Cynthia who spots the strange car cruising the neighborhood, hears untraceable phone calls, and discovers the ominous "gifts". And as Cynthia's nerves begin to unravel, no one's innocence is guaranteed, not even her own. By the time the first body is found, it's clear that her past is mre of a mystery than she ever imagined - or may ever survive.

Someone has returned to this Connecticut town to finish what was started twenty-five years ago. And by the time Terry and Cynthia discover the killer's shocking identity, it will be too late even for goodbye.

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Cynthia Bigge was 14-years-old when the morning after a terrible fight with her parents she woke up and her family was gone and never returned. With no evidence of a crime happened or not Cynthia is left to grow up at her aunt Tessa's house.

25 years later Cynthia's husband has his doubts in the TV show Cynthia decided to do. He is not sure it will really help Cynthia in her quest to find her family and believes it might just worsen the situation. And worsen it did.
It begins with cars Cynthia notices but hasn't she always had some car that looked suspicious to her ? A phone call she received but accidentally deleted from the phones history, the sudden appearance of her fathers old hat on the kitchen table when only she was the one who was in the house.
Terry begins to wonder if his wife might have lost it and probably suppressed the happenings from that night 25 years ago.

But when bodies turn up dead he knows for sure his wife didn't do anything of this.
Someone has come back to get to Cynthia, to finish what was forgotten 25 years ago.

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No Time for Goodbye kept me reading. Narrated by the very likeable character of Terry it twists and turns and leaves you guessing what really happened just to be surprised in the end because you just didn't think of it being so easy but then, maybe it isn't easy at all.
The reader will suspect people that might know something, or even might have been involved but you just get snippets and hunches you can't really place.
Attention grabbing until the end.

Rating:
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Hardcover: 352 pages
Publisher: Bantam (September 25, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 055380555X
ISBN-13: 978-0553805550

Linwood Barclay - Too Close To Home

"The night they killed our neighbors we never heard a thing."

In a quiet suburban neighborhood, in a house only one door away, a family is brutally murdered for no apparent reason. And you think to yourself: It could have been us.
And you start to wonder: What if we're next ?

Promise Falls isn't the kind of community where a family is shoot to death in their own home. But that is exactly what happened to the Langleys' one sweltering summer night, and no one in this small upstate New York town is more shocked than their next-door neighbors, Jim and Ellen Cutter. They visited for the occasional barbecue, and their son, Derek, was friends with Langleys' boy Adam: but how well did they really know their neighbors ?
That''s the question Jim Cutter is asking, and the answers he's getting aren't reassuring/ Albert Langley was a successful, well respected criminal lawyer, but was he so good at getting criminals off that he was the victim of revenge - a debt his innocent family also paid in blood ?
From the towns criminally corrupt mayor to the tragic suicide of a talented student a decade before, Promise Falls has more than a share of secrets. And Jim Cutter, failed artist turned landscaper, need look no further than his own home and his wife Ellen's past to know that things aren't always what they seem.

Suddenly the Cutters' must face the unthinkable: that the murderer isn't just stalking too close to home but is inside it already. For the Langleys' weren't the first to die and they won't be last.

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When Derek Cutter's friends family leaves for vacation he looks up to a coming week of having a secret love nest for himself and his girlfriend Penny. He hides in their basement, strolling through the house as soon as they leave. Surprisingly the family returns shortly after and Derek has to hide back in the basement. He hears someone else arrive, listens to a short argument and the first shot, soon followed by two other shots. When the killer leaves the house Derek fleas. But police isn't so stupid: They soon discover the boy was in the house and is arrested for circumstantial evidence.
His parents Jim & Ellen are in shock, trying to understand what is going on. More so father Jim who doesn't believe a single second his boy is a murderer. He begins his own investigations starting with only a clue Derek was able to provide:
A missing PC tower from his friends desk which had a strange but "cool" novel on it.
The boys got it from one of Jim's customers whose son killed himself a decade ago.
For Jim the killing begins to tape shape when he notices that this novel was published two years after the authors death by no other than the college leader and boss of his wife: Conrad Chase. Where ever Jim turns he always comes back to the missing PC tower and the novel.
Very slowly he peels away layer after layer, discovering the women, his wife, whom he slowly began to trust again after a betrayal years ago, has deep dark secrets hidden from him but following his guts, he ultimately figures out the Langleys' were never the intended victim. Instead his past, the towns criminal corrupt mayors and his wife's past come together ultimately facing the murderer of not only the Langleys' but three other victims. But the killer isn't finished yet. He has an agenda of revenge and won't stop until he is stopped.

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Too close To Home is the first novel I read by Linwood Barclay and I enjoyed every single page of it. Very suspenseful the author keeps things coming at the reader that aren't what they seem to be. Jim's character is one of uniqueness but also one of much frustration with life and his social standpoint. He his an artist at heart but no one likes his paintings except his family. So he has his personal punching back Lance who's constantly picking at him about his downfall from working for the mayor to landscaping. He even once, with right, punched the mayor's nose.
However, Jim is good at heart. Fair to his child and people surrounding him. For me a like able, human, character all around.
Impressively Barclay brought in a lot of different stories into this book that made sense at the end and also surprised because in the beginning I thought those are only stories to get the background and kind of personalities who are taking part in the plot. Never did I imagine it becomes vital for the whole story.

Overall a very good book that kept me reading non-stop.

Rating:
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Hardcover: 416 pages
Publisher: Bantam (September 30, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0553805568
ISBN-13: 978-0553805567