August 11, 2010: Never Wave Goodbye

Never Wave Goodbye* by Dough Magee

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. -- from Amazon.com*

I thought that the plot of this story had huge potential to be very good, however I think Magee failed to make it work here.  There wasn't much suspense, I figured out the dramatic twist very soon after I started reading.  I am a huge fan of red herrings in thrillers because they keep me on my toes and I rarely guess, however, Magee was not successful in providing red herrings.  In fact, I felt it was so obvious who was involved because he kind of kept pointing it out.  Regarding the twist without giving it away - I feel that it was never resolved and never really explored to the fullest.  

I found the story of Lena's dad to be irrelevant.  Who cares if he couldn't come back into the country, but he did it anyway.  Did it add anything at all to the story?  Nope.  If Magee was going to write about the risk Lena's dad was taking and he could go to jail, he should have written her father as someone who had something to do with the kidnapping or when he crossed the border was immediately arrested and the affect that may have had.  Instead it was just filler.

The epilogue was lame to me.  I wish it would have been a reunion of sorts between the four grown children.  Heck, just an update would have been better than what we were given.  

So I give points to Magee for the basic plot summary, it's the execution I have a problem with.

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