Fourteen-year-old Cynthia Bigge woke one morning to discover that her entire family, mother, father, brother had vanished. No note, no trace, no return. Ever. Now, twenty-five years later, she’ll learn the devastating truth

Sometimes better not to know. . . .

Cynthia is happily married with a young daughter, a new family. But the story of her old family isn’t over.

A strange car in the neighborhood, untraceable phone calls, ominous gifts, someone has returned to her hometown to finish what was started twenty-five years ago. And no one’s innocence is guaranteed, not even her own.

By the time Cynthia discovers her killer’s shocking identity, it will again be too late…

Even for goodbye.

Read by: Christopher Lane

I loved the audiobook version but I can definitely tell when it was written. People still had no cameras or video doorbells. “I see dead people” was a reference. Brown sedans and mystics still had power on TV. People had an answerphone and could not do caller id properly. Definitely the late 90’s or early 2000s.

Written from the Husband’s perspective, we get to meet Cynthia as an adult woman, anxious about her only child, over-protective a little but with good cause. While she’s seeing a therapist both alone and with her hubby, her anxiety levels are so high that her daughter, only 8, fears that a big asteroid will someday hit the planet so she spends her time looking through the telescope in case something is coming to take her parents away.

Cynthia’s paranoia seems unbased. It’s been 25 years since her parent’s and brother’s sudden dissapearance and her renewed obsession with closure – or just getting to know what happened – has attracted some wild characters. A con artist who says she can “see” what happened and has a message but for a fee. Some mysterious calls and emails that say “your parents forgive you”. Nutters.

The husband is all for it and even if their tiny budget is stretched by the hiring of a private detective, there is something wrong as his wife’s aunt dies horribly and then the investigator goes missing.

My only gripe with this book is how slow it moves. Half-way through and we have no real leads into the mystery other than a few old newspaper clippings that were collected from the old house drawers.

It’s only when one note appears (written on their house typewriter) showing where they can find them that the police gets mobilised and they drag out a sunken car with two skeletons – a woman and a teenage boy, possibly Cynthia’s mother and brother. The dad is still nowhere to be found.

Suspicions rise as to who wrote the note and unfortunately our guy is not fast enough to say he trusts his wife completely so she takes off in the middle of the night along with their daughter, leaving a note behind. Besides it being a dick move, it’s a stupid move. She leaves no indication as to where she is, she turns off her phone and doesn’t show up to work, leaving the husband to deal with the crap. If I were him, I’d have called the cops ASAP – it’s almost like those cases you hear about when a spouse takes the kid and disappears – FBI gets involved and it’s child abduction even if they are married. Instead, our doormat (loving husband), decides to only tell a few people – his boss and a friend of the family – nothing to the police and to the school or her workplace. And the extra stupid move he does is go and find her highschool sweatheart to interrogate him about what happened 25 years ago and ask for his wife back.

So if you can suspend your disbelief, Vince, is actually a likeable thug. He killed a man in an alley who murdered his girl and baby daughter in a drunken hit an run. He’s rough but protective of his step daughter who just happens to be in the Husband’s class at school. She’s the only reason he doesn’t get whacked.

I loved the voice the narrator chose for Vince – reminded me of every Italian in every American movie ever made. I could almost see him eating Gazpacho in a wife-beater while wildly talking with his hands.

So once they cleared out the air and no accusations, Vince does reveal a little bit of info – he went over to Cynthia’s house that evening and saw a suspicious car surveilling the house and taking off in a car after the mother left with the boy. The husband followed in a different car.

They go back to his own house and just by luck Vince comes across a picture of Todd – Cynthia’s brother – and realises the background is all wrong – the name in the picture is wrong too. And from here it all comes loose. The father had a second family and the picture was of his son, who looked like Todd, who was the same as a stranger Cynthia approached in a food court thinking it was her brother. (It was truly her step-brother). They have a name, they have a city so they end up calling around until they hit the right number – and a woman is immediately suspicious of them.

They drive off there but something must have tipped the woman off as she still answers the door to unknown men calling after 9PM and while she’s in a wheelchair and denies any knowledge of Cynthia and her family, the Husband doesn’t believe her and asks to talk to her husband who carries the same name as his wife’s father.

He and Vince split up, he stays with the woman and he goes to the local hospital where apparently the man was in a coma. He wasn’t really and he’s happy to unravel everything that happened. He had indeed a second family but his other wife was insane and jealous and poisoned their kid to hate him and his other family. When she found out he changed his will leaving all his things to Cynthia, she went mad with anger and instructed her boy (their son) to go and kill Cynthia but make it look like a suicide caused by too much stress (That’s why he killed the aunt and the investigator and left all those notes). The old man also warns that Vince might be in danger as his wheelchair-bound wife has a gun she normally keeps with her under a blanket in her lap.

They do a hospital escape worthy of a movie and by the time they reach Vince he was already lying on the floor with a blood wound.

I liked the story end. There were a few more twists and turns and a mostly happy end but I can’t help but feel that the baddies were super bad and the dad who left his kid was an asshole.

The husband’s perspective was well written but anxious Cynthia was very much just a very traumatised woman who needed a therapist badly.

I liked the few red-herrings thrown in there as well – like the Schizophrenia possibility but otherwise the book is sadly very very forgettable.