You Never Said Goodbye

You Never Said Goodbye begins as an easy reading slow burner and we are taken on a tour of London, to a small Cheshire village, and eventually the wilderness of America’s north-east; the time line and chapters switching back and forth to ground the reader.

The plot is controlled on a knife-edge; danger lurks at every new location. It springs to life and falls back; our hero escapes and eventually flies to Connecticut to solve a family mystery.

The smouldering fires of tension and threats burst into life when Sam Cooper lands at JFK. By the time he reaches his destination, secretly followed and tracked by mysterious and possibly both good and evil assassins, the plot is a roaring, engulfing conflagration with a pace that grips the reader and doesn’t let go.

The differences between English and American, in language and diet, provide a base upon which the plot can manoeuvre comfortably. Where lethal weapons are banned in England, they are everyday accouterments, like cufflinks and necklaces, in the US; a handy burger in Anglo Saxon England becomes a dustbin lid-size in the New England wilderness.

This is a gripping crime thriller. It is a complex and potentially confusing search for a family whose members have mostly died; or have they? Sam Cooper is baffled. He is in the USA because of something he was told, but at every turn that something is proved false. Help in his search appears fully armed and ready to shoot, but with so many guns firing and bodies falling our hero is losing track and belief in what is right and wrong. He is drawn inexorably into a complex, sometimes confusing, familial search. People who should be alive are dead, and are the dead still alive?

The finale of You Never Said Goodbye is extended, but never failing in its ability to hold the reader, like a villain’s powerful grip round his victim’s neck. Finally, the reader can breathe a sigh of relief, not just because of the eventual outcome, but because it all becomes clear.

Families, eh? You can’t choose them!