Brazil: Sextante
Germany: Aufbau
Netherlands: Ambo | Anthos
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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.
Mysterious Reviews:
The innocent act of a parent watching their excited child board a bus for summer camp, only to learn later that the bus is a decoy and the child has been kidnapped, is the premise for the suspense thriller Never Wave Goodbye by Doug Magee.
Never Wave Goodbye starts strong and never wavers. A sentence early in the book succinctly sums up what the parents are facing: "What sort of person not only kidnaps your kid but then yanks the rug out from under your expectations, throws you for a loop, doubles the uncertainty, and deepens the anxiety for the fate of your child?" This delicate balance between the certainty of the kidnapping and the uncertainty of what comes next is exceptionally well handled; the range of emotions exhibited by the parents is realistically depicted and possibly more importantly, the children are portrayed as complex characters caught up in an unimaginable situation.
Never Wave Goodbye is a thoughtful thriller that will keep readers questioning what's really happening and why. Also noteworthy is the introspective epilogue that closes the book in a special, quite touching manner.
Reading at the Beach.com:
Forget about being hooked from the first page, this book had me at the blurb. It was like seeing a car accident on the side of the road and not being able to not look. I had to read it. The book gets better and better until your knuckles are white and you're holding your breath and wondering how this nightmare will end. This could happen anywhere to anyone and that makes the book all the more frightening. This is not only one of the best books I've read this year, but that I've ever read.
Booklist:
Magee shows definite promise as a thriller writer.
Bryan Gruley, author of Starvation Lake:
Never Wave Goodbye is a moving love story, a searing family drama, a stomach-churning thriller and one hell of a tale well-told. Go ahead and try to put it down.
Robert Dugoni, author of Bodily Harm:
A page turner of the first order. Scary and believable.
Michael Koryta, author of So Cold the River:
Never Wave Goodbye opens with one of the strongest dramatic twists I've read in a long time, but Doug Magee is truly just getting started. In this suburban nightmare scenario that brings to mind the best of Harlan Coben and Linwood Barclay, Magee proves himself to be a powerful new voice who separates from the pack by paying as much attention to human relationships as he does plot twists.
C.J. Box, author of Nowhere to Run:
Never Wave Goodbye blasts right out of the chute with a terrifying premise and doesn't ease up until the final pages. It's a wrenching first novel that grips the reader personally and emotionally and makes one ask, "What would I do in similar circumstances?"
R.L. Stine, author of the Goosebumps series:
Don't get on the bus -- unless you're looking for a terrifying read. Magee shifts the suspense into Drive in chapter one -- and then we're off on a chilling ride to scream land.
Paul Doiron, author of The Poacher's Son:
Giving nothing away, this thriller leaves you hanging on till the very end to learn who kidnapped four children on their way to camp and why. The interweaving of the stories of the children, their parents, and the kidnappers creates a delicious knot of mystery and culpability that isn't fully untangled until the redemptive finale.
A Year in Books:
This was a particularly thrilling novel [with] more than enough twists and turns to keep the reader interested. The plot idea is fascinating and you can feel the terror emanating from the actions and words of the various characters. Overall, an enjoyable book! If you like James Patterson, I suspect you will also enjoy this author!