Never Wave Goodbye

By:  Doug Magee

From Goodreads:  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.

I thought Never Wave Goodbye was ok.  It was good, but not super fantastic.  The writing was adequate, it was good for a first novel. 

The characters seemed realistic.  The problems that the adults had seemed like problems that I suppose the average group of adults would have.  The kids seemed to be better written though to me.  Their actions and reactions seemed a bit more natural.

The biggest problem I had with this book was the reasoning behind the kidnapping.  A straight up ransom would have been a lot better to me.  Even if it was a kidnap for hire by the first party we find out about, that would be a stretch, but again would have made more sense to me.  As it was written it got way too convoluted and I really can't believe that the parties involved really would have agreed to what was being proposed. 

I thought it was going pretty well until the last third of the book and then I started getting disappointed in it.  I think my overall grade would probably have to end up being a C+.  I would read future writings by this author in hopes that they would be an improvement.