By Liz Soares
Kudos to Viking for bringing England’s Tim Weaver to American readers. But I really must know when his previous five thrillers will be published here.
I raced through Never Coming Back, which is the latest in Weaver’s David Raker series. It has a plot so complex I had to diagram it. I’ve never done that for any other mystery writer but my all-time favorite, Ross Macdonald. His detective, Lew Archer, specializes in missing persons, as Raker does. And Macdonald’s The Zebra-Striped Hearse is a perfect study in the art of plotting.
Since I came in late to Raker’s career, it took me a few chapters to sort out the storyline. In the prologue, which takes place five years earlier, Raker is in Las Vegas, where he runs into an old friend. He’s also accosted and threatened by a guy who seems to know this friend, Lee. Raker’s a journalist at this point; he doesn’t become a private investigator until after his wife dies, making the incident even more inexplicable.
As the story proper begins, Raker has nearly died on a previous case, and has returned to the quaint cottage his late parents built in a seaside town in Devon. His recuperation is interrupted by two events. First, a body encased in plastic washes ashore. Then, an old girlfriend asks him to find out what happened to her sister and her family.
The Lings—Carrie and Paul and their daughters, Annabel and Olivia—disappeared without a trace. They went missing in the middle of supper preparation; a bottle of milk lay dripping on the floor, and their dog was wandering around the house. The local constabulary seem to have given up on the case, especially since the unidentified body arrived on the waves.
Raker looks into the Lings’ backgrounds and follows a few meager clues. The parents were reportedly seen at the country manor of a billionaire tycoon, but the man who reported it had bad eyesight, and recently died. The girls were allegedly spotted in London. Then there’s the phone call Paul received a few days before the family disappeared. Raker traces it to a phone box on a lonely country road. What he finds in a deserted farmhouse nearby starts him on a bloody trail that leads him straight back to Las Vegas.
In the final third of the book, a rapid-fire series of events leads to what I thought might be the denouement. But characters cross and double-cross, and there are at least three twists to the tale. The case doesn’t reach its satisfying conclusion until the absolute last page.
Never Coming Back, as Weaver has pointed out, covers much ground, in terms of both time and space. The insularity of the damp, windswept village contrasts with Weaver’s vivid depiction of Las Vegas—both the frenetic gambling mecca and the silent desert that surrounds it. “The road kinked left, into a kind of enclosed wave of red rock, like a tunnel with no roof. Singed cottonwood began appearing halfway along, looming overhead, and then I emerged into a flat, circular space, surrounded by trees and loose rubble.”
Miln Cross, a Devon village near the one where Raker was recuperating, plays a key role in the mystery. It was destroyed in a landslide years earlier, but Carrie and Paul were seen there as well. Why? The place is abandoned, spooky: “Whole roofs were missing from some, the windows empty and ark like open mouths, and walls were perforated with holes where the sea had punctured them as the storm raged.”
Though Weaver is not officially investigating a murder, he encounters plenty of blood and death along the way; one memorable scene features a nail gun not used for its intended purpose. There’s a truly frightening bad guy named Cornell, whom I kept envisioning as Vladimir Putin. Cornell never blinks. He has no soul.
Raker’s friend, Colm Healy, a washed-up former cop, gets involved in the case. A surly fisherman called Prouse, a Vegas call girl, an Anglo-American doctor now based in California, and Carter Graham, a powerful, wealthy entrepreneur, are other key players.
An old photograph proves to be the trigger for the chain of events that leads to the Lings’ disappearance. Raker unravels a tangled mess, moving from a name burbled from a dying man’s lips to a red toy computer in the shape of a caterpillar to a panic room in a mansion deep in the desert. It’s a wild ride, well worth taking.
I raced through Never Coming Back, which is the latest in Weaver’s David Raker series. It has a plot so complex I had to diagram it. I’ve never done that for any other mystery writer but my all-time favorite, Ross Macdonald. His detective, Lew Archer, specializes in missing persons, as Raker does. And Macdonald’s The Zebra-Striped Hearse is a perfect study in the art of plotting.
Since I came in late to Raker’s career, it took me a few chapters to sort out the storyline. In the prologue, which takes place five years earlier, Raker is in Las Vegas, where he runs into an old friend. He’s also accosted and threatened by a guy who seems to know this friend, Lee. Raker’s a journalist at this point; he doesn’t become a private investigator until after his wife dies, making the incident even more inexplicable.
As the story proper begins, Raker has nearly died on a previous case, and has returned to the quaint cottage his late parents built in a seaside town in Devon. His recuperation is interrupted by two events. First, a body encased in plastic washes ashore. Then, an old girlfriend asks him to find out what happened to her sister and her family.
The Lings—Carrie and Paul and their daughters, Annabel and Olivia—disappeared without a trace. They went missing in the middle of supper preparation; a bottle of milk lay dripping on the floor, and their dog was wandering around the house. The local constabulary seem to have given up on the case, especially since the unidentified body arrived on the waves.
Raker looks into the Lings’ backgrounds and follows a few meager clues. The parents were reportedly seen at the country manor of a billionaire tycoon, but the man who reported it had bad eyesight, and recently died. The girls were allegedly spotted in London. Then there’s the phone call Paul received a few days before the family disappeared. Raker traces it to a phone box on a lonely country road. What he finds in a deserted farmhouse nearby starts him on a bloody trail that leads him straight back to Las Vegas.
In the final third of the book, a rapid-fire series of events leads to what I thought might be the denouement. But characters cross and double-cross, and there are at least three twists to the tale. The case doesn’t reach its satisfying conclusion until the absolute last page.
Never Coming Back, as Weaver has pointed out, covers much ground, in terms of both time and space. The insularity of the damp, windswept village contrasts with Weaver’s vivid depiction of Las Vegas—both the frenetic gambling mecca and the silent desert that surrounds it. “The road kinked left, into a kind of enclosed wave of red rock, like a tunnel with no roof. Singed cottonwood began appearing halfway along, looming overhead, and then I emerged into a flat, circular space, surrounded by trees and loose rubble.”
Miln Cross, a Devon village near the one where Raker was recuperating, plays a key role in the mystery. It was destroyed in a landslide years earlier, but Carrie and Paul were seen there as well. Why? The place is abandoned, spooky: “Whole roofs were missing from some, the windows empty and ark like open mouths, and walls were perforated with holes where the sea had punctured them as the storm raged.”
Though Weaver is not officially investigating a murder, he encounters plenty of blood and death along the way; one memorable scene features a nail gun not used for its intended purpose. There’s a truly frightening bad guy named Cornell, whom I kept envisioning as Vladimir Putin. Cornell never blinks. He has no soul.
Raker’s friend, Colm Healy, a washed-up former cop, gets involved in the case. A surly fisherman called Prouse, a Vegas call girl, an Anglo-American doctor now based in California, and Carter Graham, a powerful, wealthy entrepreneur, are other key players.
An old photograph proves to be the trigger for the chain of events that leads to the Lings’ disappearance. Raker unravels a tangled mess, moving from a name burbled from a dying man’s lips to a red toy computer in the shape of a caterpillar to a panic room in a mansion deep in the desert. It’s a wild ride, well worth taking.
