Book Notices | Never Go Back by Robert Goddard

Robert Goddard, Never Go Back

Amazon   Back in England for his mother's funeral, Harry Barnett winds up traveling to a Scottish castle for a 50th reunion weekend with his old RAF buddies. They'd been involved in an experiment at the castle back then—learning academic subjects in an isolated setting for three months in lieu of their regular service. Their stint as guinea pigs had been uneventful, or so Harry had always thought. But the reunion stirs up some old memories and a lot of trouble, and Harry and one of his RAF mates find themselves on the hook for murder. I've enjoyed a handful of Robert Goddard's novels in the past, but this one dragged for me. In addition to a not very exciting plot, the big problem was that a lot of names are thrown at the reader early on—a bunch of secondary characters who are sometimes referred to by their given names and sometimes by nicknames. It was just too much. I was never able to keep them straight and wound up not caring about any of them.