Although it took a while to get going, Never Coming Back kept me guessing until the end.
If you read the blurb, you find out the premise--that a family has gone missing, and the sister has asked Raker (an ex-boyfriend) to look into it. Well, that doesn't happen until chapter 10, page 38. This is also the fourth book in the series, so you hear a lot about how Raker almost died and is recovering. And this character, Healy, who is Raker's friend is in this book -- but not really for any reason. I assume he's been featured in prior books, but in Never Coming Back, he didn't play much of a role.
Also, the first part of the book switched POVs from one that is first-person to third-person. It took me a while to figure out who "I" was for the first-person chapters. Soon the third-person perspective ends.
So, I got the bad stuff out of the way. The setting is on the coast of England. The story moves slowly, but it kind of needs to because it is a very tangled web. Not only has the family been missing for seven months, but a body has been found washed up on the rocks. Raker has come to England to escape his past and forget about finding missing people. But of course, that is not to be.
The villains are particularly brutal. And some are surprises. I liked that when it seems like Raker is getting things all sorted out there are still 100 pages left, so you know there's more figuring to do. I think I would have been more attached to the main characters if I had read earlier books, but I still enjoyed the story. Lots of twists and turns, and a bit of luck -- which always seems to happen in these kinds of books.
All in all, Never Coming Back is an entertaining read that kept my interest -- and kept me guessing.
Published by Plume, 2013
Copy obtained from a friend
372 pages
Rating: 4/5
This sounds pretty good. It's kind of fun to have horrible villains.
ReplyDeleteSounds like this one would drive me crazy. Too confusing and slow. I'm glad you ended up enjoying it, in spite of the irritants.
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