Review: Never Wave Goodbye by Doug Magee

Never Wave Goodbye: A Novel of Suspense

Author: Doug Magee

Publication Date: June 1, 2010

Publisher: Touchstone (Simon & Schuster)

ISBN: 978-1439153987

289 pages

An innocent rite of passage turns into a nightmare for four couples, exposing their secrets and risking the lives of their children.

After passing the bittersweet parental milestone of putting her daughter, Sarah on the bus to sleep-away camp for the first time, Lena Trainor plans to spend the next two weeks fixing all the problems in her marriage. But when a second bus arrives to pick up Sarah for camp, no one seems to know anything about the first bus or its driver.

Sarah and three other children have been kidnapped, and within hours of the crime the parents receive an email demanding $1,000,000. When the specifics of the delivery terms throw suspicion on the parents of two of the abducted children, some of the parents begin to turn on each other, exposing fault lines in already strained marriages and forging new alliances. While the kidnapped children are living their parents’ worst nightmare, the police are trying to sort the lies from the truth in conflicting stories and alibis that seem to be constantly changing.

Deftly weaving the emotional story that pits the parents of the missing campers against the police—and each other—with the fate of the kidnapped children hanging in the balance, Never Wave Goodbye will keep readers holding their breath until the last page.

My Thoughts:

I really enjoy novels of suspense. They keep me on my toes, trying to figure out what is going to happen next. This novel is no different. I was completely captivated by this storyline and eager to see how it all wrapped up. A parent’s worst nightmare come to life. The vehicle going to camp arrives, you put your child in the car, wave goodbye. A short while later, the real car going to camp arrives. It gives me chills just thinking about it!

Lena Trainor is a devoted mom and hopes to spend the two weeks that her daughter, Sarah, is away at camp working on her crumbling marriage. When she puts Sarah in the camp van, she continues about her day until a short while later when the REAL camp van shows up. Lena is thrust into a maelstrom of emotions as she tries to figure out what is happening. Calls to the three other sets of parents whose children are also going on the van reveals that they have been picked up by the imposter camp employee, too. What ensues is a novel of suspense, with suspicion thrown in every direction, including the parents. Who would do such a thing? And why?

The premise of the story is very unique and held my attention for the most part. There were some things that kind of bothered me, though. There were multiple shifts in POV, sometimes even from paragraph to paragraph. The book is mostly told from the POV of Lena. I felt a connection with Lena. I could feel her emotional upheaval and feelings of helplessness as she tries to figure out what happened and how she can get her daughter back. I felt no real connection to most of the other characters, so I didn’t “get” why we needed the other POVs in the story. I don’t feel that they added anything to the story and could have been weaved in as part of Lena’s POV, through her conversations with them (texts, email, phone, etc.). It got distracting for me after a while.

Overall, this was just an okay read for me. It’s definitely full of suspense and leaves you guessing what will happen in the end. I know that I was completely shocked by the revelation of the kidnappers and how the story wrapped up. This is definitely worth a read if you like suspense books!