Never Go Back (Harry Barnett)

Product Description

In the spellbinding new mystery by the master of “the clever twist,” a group of ex-RAF comrades journey to a Scottish castle for a reunion. But by the time they reach their destination, two of them are dead.

Harry Barnett is leading a contented life in Vancouver with his wife and daughter when he is brought back to England by the death of his mother. He intends to spend just a few days sorting out her affairs when a chance meeting he will regret for the rest of his life makes him change his plans. Two old acquaintances from his National Service days track Harry down to his mother’s house — the last address they had for him. A lavish reunion has been organized to mark the fiftieth anniversary of their RAF days. Harry decides to go.

During the war, Harry and his fellow RAF conscripts spent three months in a Scottish castle where they acted as guinea pigs in a psychological experiment. The reunion is to take place in the same castle. It will be a chance to see friends, settle old scores and lay a few ghosts to rest.

The party begins on the train up to Aberdeen, until the apparent suicide of one of their number shatters the holiday atmosphere. Their arrival in Scotland seems under a cloud, and when another comrade dies soon after their arrival, Harry is gripped by a sense of foreboding. As well, the recollections of the old comrades of their time in the castle are frighteningly different, and unexplained events from 1955 still haunt them. As Harry tries to solve the mystery of what really happened fifty years ago, he uncovers an extraordinary secret that convinces him he will never leave the castle alive.

From Publishers Weekly

At the start of British author Goddard’s well-crafted new thriller, Harry Barnett, the almost too unprepossessing hero of
Into the Blue and
Out of the Sun, returns to his hometown of Swindon, where he gets unexpectedly swept into a reunion of RAF servicemen with whom he had participated in a three-month research project 50 years earlier. Clever nicknames and brief characterizations help the reader keep track of the 14 members of the group, some of whom have died in the intervening years. After returning to the Scottish castle where the experiment took place, Harry’s compatriots start (a bit predictably) dropping like flies, and suspicions grow about the true nature of the long-ago project, ostensibly only an exercise in gauging the effect of intensified academic pressure. Barnett, reunited with his dodgy pal Barry Fission Chipchase, is caught in the middle, and soon the two find themselves the primary suspects in the murders. Smooth prose and pitch-perfect pacing make this otherwise conventional story entertaining and absorbing.
(Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* In 1955, Harry Barnett and a group of fellow Royal Air Force servicemen participated in a teaching experiment in a castle on the outskirts of Aberdeen, Scotland. (Each agreed to be a guinea pig in lieu of punishment for bad behavior.) Now, 50 years later, surviving RAF alumni are invited to a reunion at the same royal locale. Though Barnett, now 70, is reluctant to be away from his wife and young daughter in Vancouver, British Columbia, he decides to go. Tragedy strikes when one of the retired servicemen jumps from the train en route from London (or was he pushed?). In the midst of the reunion, a suspicious automobile accident kills another, and suddenly this get-together doesn’t seem like such a good plan. Police soon name Harry and former business partner Barry, whose shady financial dealings once landed him in prison, as prime suspects. Certain the violence is linked to the experiments carried out half a century ago, the two men launch an investigation of their own. Goddard’s latest offering marks the return of unlikely hero Harry Barnett, star of Into the Blue (1990) and Out of the Sun (1997). It’s a crackling good re