Never Go Back is the new bestseller by Robert Goddard, author of Past Caring, and the WH Smith Award-winning Into The Blue, which was filmed starring John Thaw.
For over twenty years, ever since his stunning debut with Past Caring, Robert Goddard has been acclaimed as ‘The Prince of Plotters.’ His best known novel is the WH Smith Thumping Good Read Award-winning Into The Blue, which was made into a television drama starring the late John Thaw, and was the first of a series that continued with Out of the Sun, and now Never Go Back.
To his critics, Goddard’s novels are formulaic, and certainly there are similarities. An apparently innocent central character is drawn into a web of intrigue by malevolent, unseen forces, and forced to counter-intrigue to stay alive or free (or both) at which point they stand revealed as being not so innocent as they first seem.
However, while the plots are similar, the setting and variations and above all the characters – and novels are all about characterization – are all different enough, and the mystery compelling enough to pull the reader along.
Never Go Back is a prime case in point.
Fifty years after finishing his national service, Harry Barnett has come home to arrange his mother’s funeral and settle her estate, such as it is. Chance brings him face to face with a couple of old colleagues who have been looking for him. He agrees to attend a reunion in a Scottish castle where they all spent three months as experimental subjects of an innocuous test procedure.
But on the way one of their number disappears, and soon after another one is killed in a car crash while his partner somehow manages to survive. The police settle on Harry and his ex-partner as the main suspects, and when a third member of their group is killed, Harry realizes that the police’s preoccupation with them is not only allowing the real killer go free, but putting all of the group – Harry included – in danger. The only way that they will survive is to catch the real killer.
Harry’s convenient doormat-like behaviour regarding the police, particularly given his previous experiences rings less than completely true, and nearly undermined credibility fatally. The other aspect is how much strangeness can one life, even one stretching past seventy years, actually hold?
Never Go back also breaks an unwritten tenet of the thriller -- never write a sequel -- the readers know that the hero survives.
However, Goddard manages to produce a credible and satisfactory ending to what felt like the conclusion of a trilogy, but which may yet turn out to be a series, particularly given Goddard's powers of invention.
