Sunday Salon: Linwood Barclay, No Time For Goodbye

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 through 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.

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