No Time For Goodbye

Summary

This novel is a crime thriller, with bits of murder, panic and a touch of affection, the right mix for a perfect novel. This novel starts with Cynthia Bigge waking up on a morning on May 1963, to find her father, Clayton Bigge, her mother, Patricia Bigge and her brother Todd Bigge mysteriously disappeared. She vaguely remembers the night before when she lied to her parents that she was meeting her friend Pam's house and instead went on a date with her 17 year old boyfriend, Vince Fleming, a boy with an outlaw as his father. Having missed curfew, her father clears his suspicions as he finds Cynthia and Vince together. She is pulled to home, and she storms into her home and starts drinking from the bottles of alcohol she had sneaked from her boyfriend. She is adopted by Tess Berman, her aunt and finishes her studies, marries Terrence Archer and begets a Daughter, Grace Archer. But after 25 yrs, of her family's mysterious disappearance, she finds out the fact that her aunt had been receiving wads of bills from a mysterious person for Cynthia's education, and then followed by her aunt's and Denton Abagnall's(A private hired detective investigating about Cynthia's past)death. She also receives a mysterious letter which revealed where her family was. She finds her mother and Todd under a deep lake in an abandoned quarry. This is the point where she begins to suspect whether was the Clayton Bigge he knew. When she discovered the truth, however, it was more stranger than anyone would have imagined. She leaves her home with her daughter, afraid of the shocks she would face anymore. Terrence Archer, Cynthia's Husband, joins hands with Vince Fleming and finds out Clayton Sloan had married Enid Sloan at high school believing the lie told by Enid that she was pregnant and after he really gets a son, Jeremy Sloan, on a business trip, meets Patricia Berman, introduces himself as Clayton Bigge, marries Patricia and leads a second household with her. However, Enid finds out and kills Patricia and Todd in a drugstore that night and Clayton leaves Cynthia and goes with Enid, to save Cynthia's Life and sent money every month to Tess. However, at the same time Clayton escaped from the Hospital he was admitted to, Enid found out about Clayton's will that he was handing all his properties to Cynthia and grace and tried to kill them. but Clayton stopped this and in the due process killed himself. But, when thinking all was over, An newspaper clipping about A girl called Connie Gormley and how her post-mortem report showed she was killed before the accident happened to her. That's when Terrence finds out Roland Carruthers, Principal of the school where Terrence was working as A creative writing teacher and Clayton's bestie had killed Connie Gormley accidentally and set it up as an accident and Clayton had made Roland give the money to Tess so that he would not give the information to the cops. However, when Tess revealed about the cash to Terrence and Roland(not knowing Roland was giving the money, he killed Tess so that she would not analyze and find about the cash and Killed Denton Abagnall as the envelopes in which the cash was with Denton. Cynthia and Terrence however were held at gunpoint in their own house by Roland. But Cynthia Manages to knock him down and hand him over to the cops. The story ends with Cynthia reading the letter her mom had wrote for her on that unfortunate night and her father takes it thinking it was too fast to smooth over things, not knowing that it was a mother's last words with her child.

Critical reception

The novel received mainly positive reviews. Emma-Lee Potter of The Daily Express called the novel "a fast-moving roller-coaster of a read" and Laura Wilson of The Guardian said "Barclay succeeds in both banging the gong and serving up a riveting, rewarding and, for the most part, plausible three courses, though you may need to take a deep breath somewhere around the coffee stage."