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Summary
Summary
In the spellbinding new mystery by the master of "the clever twist," a group of ex-RAF comrades journey to a Scottish castle for a reunion. But by the time they reach their destination, two of them are dead.
Harry Barnett is leading a contented life in Vancouver with his wife and daughter when he is brought back to England by the death of his mother. He intends to spend just a few days sorting out her affairs when a chance meeting he will regret for the rest of his life makes him change his plans. Two old acquaintances from his National Service days track Harry down to his mother's house -- the last address they had for him. A lavish reunion has been organized to mark the fiftieth anniversary of their RAF days. Harry decides to go.
During the war, Harry and his fellow RAF conscripts spent three months in a Scottish castle where they acted as guinea pigs in a psychological experiment. The reunion is to take place in the same castle. It will be a chance to see friends, settle old scores and lay a few ghosts to rest.
The party begins on the train up to Aberdeen, until the apparent suicide of one of their number shatters the holiday atmosphere. Their arrival in Scotland seems under a cloud, and when another comrade dies soon after their arrival, Harry is gripped by a sense of foreboding. As well, the recollections of the old comrades of their time in the castle are frighteningly different, and unexplained events from 1955 still haunt them. As Harry tries to solve the mystery of what really happened fifty years ago, he uncovers an extraordinary secret that convinces him he will never leave the castle alive.
Author Notes
Robert Goddard's first novel Past Caring was an instant bestseller. Since then his books have captivated readers worldwide with their edge-of-the-seat pace and labyrinthine plots.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
At the start of British author Goddard's well-crafted new thriller, Harry Barnett, the almost too unprepossessing hero of Into the Blue and Out of the Sun, returns to his hometown of Swindon, where he gets unexpectedly swept into a reunion of RAF servicemen with whom he had participated in a three-month research project 50 years earlier. Clever nicknames and brief characterizations help the reader keep track of the 14 members of the group, some of whom have died in the intervening years. After returning to the Scottish castle where the experiment took place, Harry's compatriots start (a bit predictably) dropping like flies, and suspicions grow about the true nature of the long-ago project, ostensibly only an exercise in gauging the effect of intensified academic pressure. Barnett, reunited with his dodgy pal Barry "Fission" Chipchase, is caught in the middle, and soon the two find themselves the primary suspects in the murders. Smooth prose and pitch-perfect pacing make this otherwise conventional story entertaining and absorbing. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
"*Starred Review* In 1955, Harry Barnett and a group of fellow Royal Air Force servicemen participated in a teaching experiment in a castle on the outskirts of Aberdeen, Scotland. (Each agreed to be a guinea pig in lieu of punishment for bad behavior.) Now, 50 years later, surviving RAF alumni are invited to a reunion at the same royal locale. Though Barnett, now 70, is reluctant to be away from his wife and young daughter in Vancouver, British Columbia, he decides to go. Tragedy strikes when one of the retired servicemen jumps from the train en route from London (or was he pushed?). In the midst of the reunion, a suspicious automobile accident kills another, and suddenly this get-together doesn't seem like such a good plan. Police soon name Harry and former business partner Barry, whose shady financial dealings once landed him in prison, as prime suspects. Certain the violence is linked to the experiments carried out half a century ago, the two men launch an investigation of their own. Goddard's latest offering marks the return of unlikely hero Harry Barnett, star of Into the Blue (1990) and Out of the Sun (1997). It's a crackling good read, with clipped prose, complex characters, and a smart, sinuous plot."--"Block, Allison" Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN his first novel about Billy Boyle, James R. Benn labored a bit too strenuously to draw a picture of a young soldier-sleuth who epitomized everything decent and admirable about World War II America. Benn's hero is still wide-eyed and bushy-tailed in THE FIRST WAVE (Soho, $24), but his character has deepened, as have his thoughts. Now he earns respect for the good he does, rather than what he stands for. "War sure is educational," marvels this Irish cop from South Boston, who thought he was getting a cushy patronage job when Uncle Ike (a distant relative better known as the commander of United States forces in Europe) claimed the "rosy-cheeked youth" as his personal private investigator. Instead, the kid saw plenty of action on the European front and learned enough about undercover police work to pass what even his uncle had to admit was a tough initiation. "The First Wave" finds Boyle coming ashore in the 1942 Allied landing in French North Africa He's on a dangerous, if vague, mission to rally support from officers in the Vichy government forces in Algiers and to free a group of French resistance fighters, his English girlfriend among them. A better cop than secret agent, Boyle also gets wind of a smuggling ring that's depriving soldiers of the new miracle drug, penicillin, and during the course of his investigation discovers that even in the middle of a war a combat hospital offers no refuge from noncombat crimes like drug trafficking, high-stakes gambling, rape and murder. In granting Boyle a measure of maturity, Benn takes care not to put a muzzle on him. The brash kid from Southie is still open, direct and fearless in his manner (and in his wonderfully loose-jointed use of the English language) and in no danger of losing his cover as a "happy-go-lucky Yank." But even amid the excitement of the spirited wartime storytelling, Benn allows Boyle's experiences to change him in ways both subtle and dramatic. Becoming sensitized to the status of female officers - paid half the salary of men, unable to issue an order to the lowliest private and denied the dignity of a salute - is one of those subtle ways. Seeing himself from the perspective of a people whose country his own has invaded is a more striking leap for Boyle, as is his new willingness to judge foreigners by their own standards. In one painful moment of introspection, he even questions his family's rigid beliefs. Where he comes from, that's real bravery. The elderly Britons in Robert Goddard's slow-burning murder mystery NEVER GO BACK (Delta, paper, $12) haven't thought about their military service in half a century. Actually, "service" isn't precisely le mot juste, since the Royal Air Force disciplined 15 of these bad boys by sending them to Kilveen Castle, an R.A.F. outstation in Scotland, as part of Operation Tabula Rasa, an experiment to determine whether academic subjects could, under certain conditions, be drilled into brains as dull and lazy as theirs. The experiment was a failure, in that none of the flyboys manifested a sudden, unquenchable passion for learning. But when two of them re-enter Harry Barnett's life with news that a 50th reunion at Kilveen Castle has been booked and paid for, he goes off with them on the chance that his old pal Barry Chipchase might also show up. Reunions are always such fun in mystery stories, once the participants start getting themselves murdered, and Goddard is a master of the leisurely, deliberate build from wonder to doubt to suspicion, then on to fear and panic. Resisting the panic part, Harry and Barry put their heads together to find out what really happened to them at the castle, and while we wouldn't wish it on a lab rat, it makes perfect, horrible sense. Kathy Reichs denies nothing in the way of hightech lab facilities to Temperance Brennan, a forensic anthropologist whose hectic schedule has her rotating between demanding jobs in Charlotte, N.C., and Montreal. But just as the blunt and brilliant Tempe favors her own home-cooking methods for cleaning cadaver bones, in this scrupulously tended series Reichs relies on old-fashioned elements of romance as her storytelling hook. For all its gruesome plot details about predatory men who trick adolescent girls into sexual bondage and ruthlessly discard them when the girls wise up, BONES TO ASHES (Scribner, $25.95) is all heart. Even as it observes the procedures of cutting-edge forensic scienee, the story is filtered through Tempe-s childhood recollections of golden summers on Pawleys Island that ended when her best friend, Évangéline, returned north to "the belly of L'Acadie" and disappeared. A deft hand at balanting the emotional light w'tn tne dark, Reichs links the enchanting Évangéline and her Acadian heritage to the unsolved cases of dead and missing girls that have stumped the police for years. And even now, 10 books into the series, Tempe's strung-out affair with Detective-Lieutenant Andrew Ryan still hangs on the tensions that confound lovers in an atmosphere of violent death. Short stories can be little goodies you nibble on while trying to decide which novel to read next. Or as in the case of DEAD BOYS (Little, Brown, $21.99), a first collection by Richard Lange, they can be as filling as a banquet. All 12 of these are set in a gloomy and inhospitable, if not downright hostile, Los Angeles, and each is narrated by some loser guy - a salesman, a drifter, a house painter, a bank robber - yearning for something or someone either just beyond his reach or so unattainable he might as well simply lie down and die. The writing is so fine throughout that it's almost a crime to single out "Everything Beautiful Is Far Away" as a perfect specimen. A shockingly tender study of a stalker, the narrative gently probes the claustrophobic world of a newsstand clerk pining for a trashy girl who dumped him. "Everybody has the right to something nice," he says, explaining why he borrows a ladder and paints an ocean scene on the wall across the alley from the only window in his room. Unlike most of the stories, this one has a definitive ending. It's violent, it's truthful and it's devastating. James R. Benn Benn's soldier-sleuth acts as a personal investigator for his 'Uncle Ike' Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One If he had flown back with Donna, of course, it would have been all right. If her flight had been delayed by a couple of hours, it would have been enough. If he had simply turned right instead of left coming out of the cemetery, he would probably have got away with it. But it was not all right; it was not enough: he did not get away with it. In the end, the ifs and therefores amounted to nothing. Fate had set a trap for him that day. And he walked obligingly and unwittingly straight into it. Thus did a decade of good fortune for Harry Barnett come to an end without him even realizing it. Marriage and fatherhood had proved during those years to be the sweetest of surprises. He regretted coming to them so late, but the circumstances that had brought Donna and hence their daughter Daisy into his life made the delay inevitable. He had never been one to dwell on missed opportunities. The present -- and their future as a family -- were his to enjoy. The recent death of his mother had failed to puncture his contentment. A swift and gentle exit at the age of ninety-three was no cause for anguish. Her race had been run to a dignified finish. Harry's links with his birthplace had effectively died with her. He had returned to Swindon to arrange her funeral and to clear out the house she had lived in for more than seventy years. The Council would want to put another tenant in as soon as possible. The fact that 37 Falmouth Street held so much of Harry's past could not stand in their way. Nor would he have wanted it to. It was time to move on. That morning, Donna had flown back to Seattle, where Daisy had been staying with her grandparents. Mother and daughter would drive home to Vancouver tomorrow. Harry planned to join them in a week or so, when he had disposed of his mother's clothes, crockery and furniture. It was not a task he was looking forward to. But it had to be done. And there was no-one to do it but him. Such was the lot of an only child. Seeing off Donna at Heathrow and travelling back alone to Swindon had left Harry feeling sorry for himself, however. He was in no mood to begin emptying cupboards and filling bin-bags. He walked away from the station past the boundary wall of the former Great Western Railway works, then crossed the park and made his way up to Radnor Street, where his old primary school, now converted into offices, stood opposite the entrance to the cemetery. For the first time in Harry's memory, the gravestone commemorating his father, Stanley Barnett, killed in an accident in the GWR locomotive-erecting shop when Harry was three, no longer stood in its familiar place near the highest point of the cemetery. It had been removed to have the name Ivy Barnett added at long last to the inscription. Harry stood for a few minutes by the flower-strewn mound of earth that marked the spot where his mother's coffin had been lowered in on top of his father's two days ago. He breathed the clear spring air and gazed towards the flat horizon. Then he turned and slowly walked away. Leaving the cemetery on the far side, he seriously considered making for the Beehive, his local in those distant days when he had been a Swindon householder in his own right and co-proprietor of Barnchase Motors. But he reckoned a descent into beery nostalgia would not be a good start to a week of solitude and toil, so he headed downhill instead to the market hall, where he bought a couple of lamb chops for his supper before returning to Falmouth Street. It was a mild April afternoon of watery sunshine and warbling birdsong. Even the office blocks of downtown Swindon contrived to appear, if not attractive, then at least inoffensive in the restful light. The Railway Village was quiet and tranquil, a condition the average age of its residents generally guaranteed. Turning his back nobly on the beckoningly bright yellow frontage of the Glue Pot -- or at any rate deciding he should put the lamb chops in the fridge before allowing himself a swift one -- Harry crossed Emlyn Square and started along Falmouth Street. He saw the two men ahead of him before he realized it was his mother's door they were standing at. They were about his own age, which he would once have described as old, but, now he had attained it, seemed merely a bemusingly high number. One was short and tubby, anoraked, tracksuited and baseballcapped. The other, though scarcely much taller, was thinner, his clothes shabby and old-fashioned -- beltless raincoat, crumpled trousers, laced shoes in need of a polish. He had a full head of white, tousled hair, a beak-nosed, bony face and a put-upon stoop. His companion looked contrastingly at ease with himself, staring at the unanswered door of number 37 with his hands thrust idly into his anorak pockets, sunlight flashing on his glasses in time to the gum-chewing motion of his well-padded jaw. They were debating something in a desultory fashion, or so a shrug of his shoulders suggested. A battered leather suitcase and a smarter, newer holdall stood beside them on the path. Harry did not recognize them, nor could he guess what they wanted. Whatever it was, though, he felt certain they had not come to see him. Then the thinner of the two spotted him and touched the other's arm. A word passed between them. They turned and looked at Harry. As they did so, he stopped. And everything else stopped too, even the chewing of the gum. 'Ossie?' the fat one said after a moment of silence and immobility. 'That's you, isn't it?' No-one had called Harry Ossie since his National Service days, which had ended fifty years ago and been largely forgotten by him for almost as long. While his brain sent a none too nimble search party off in quest of memories that might explain this turn of events, he opened his mouth to speak -- but found nothing to say. Excerpted from Never Go Back by Robert Goddard All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
